Third Manuscript

Private Property and Labor

ad page XXXVI. [ Marx numbered the pages of these manuscripts in
roman numerals. The page referred to is one of those missing between the
First and Second Manuscripts. ]

The subjective essence of private property,
private property as activity for itself, as subject, as person, is labor.
It, therefore, goes without saying that only that political economy which
recognized labor as its principle (Adam Smith), and which therefore no
longer regarded private property as nothing more than a condition external
to man, can be regarded as both a product of the real energy and movement
of private property (it is the independent movement of private property
become conscious of itself, it is modern industry as self), a product of
modern industry, and a factor which has accelerated and glorified the energy
and development of this industry and transformed it into a power belonging
to consciousness. Therefore, the supporters of the monetary and mercantile
system, who look upon private property as a purely objective being for
man, appear as fetish-worshippers, as Catholics, to this enlightened political
economy, which has revealed – within the system of private property –
the subjective essence of wealth. Engels was, therefore, right to call
Adam Smith the Luther of political economy [in Engels 1843 Outlines
of a Critique of Political Economy]. Just as Luther recognized religion
and faith as the essence of the external world and, in consequence, confronted
Catholic paganism; just as he transcended religion external religiosity
by making religiosity the inner essence of man; just as he negated the
idea of priests as something separate and apart from the layman by transferring
the priest into the heart of the layman; so wealth as something outside
man, and independent of him – and, therefore, only to be acquired acquired
and maintained externally – is abolished [aufgehoben]. i.e., its
external and mindless objectivity is abolished inasmuch as private property
is embodied in man himself and man himself is recognized as its essence
– but this brings man himself into the province of religion. So, although
political economy, whose principle is labor, appears to recognize man,
it is, in fact, nothing more than the denial of man carried through to
its logical conclusion: for man himself no longer stands in a relation
of external tension to the external essence of private property – he himself
has become the tense essence of private property. What was formerly being-external-to-oneself,
man's material externalization, has now become the act of alienation –
i.e., alienation through selling [Verausserung]. This political
economy, therefore, starts out by seeming to recognize man, his independence,
his spontaneous activity, etc. Since it transfers private property into
the very being of man, it can no longer be conditioned by local or national
features of private property as something existing outside it. It (political
economy) develops a cosmopolitan, universal energy which breaks through
every limitation and bond and sets itself up as the only policy,
the only universality, the only limitation, and the only
bond. But then, as it continues to develop, it is forced to cast off its
hypocrisy and step forth in all its cynicism. This it does, without troubling
its head for one moment about all the apparent contradiction to which this
doctrine leads, by developing in a more one-sided way, and, thus, more
sharply and more logically, the idea of labor as the sole essence of wealth,
by showing that the conclusions of this doctrine, unlike the original conception,
are anti-human, and finally be delivering the death-blow to ground rent
– that last individual and natural form of private property and source
of wealth independent of the movement of labor, that expression of feudal
property which has already become entirely economic and is therefore incapable
of putting up any resistance to political economy. (The Ricardo School.)
Not only does political economy become increasingly cynical from Smith
through Say to Ricardo, Mill etc., inasmuch as the consequences of industry
appeared more developed and more contradictory to the latter; the latter
also became more estranged – consciously estranged – from man than their
predecessors. But this is only because their science develops more logically
and more truly. Since they make private property in its active form the
subject, thereby making man as a non-being [Unwesen] the essence [Wesen],
the contradiction in reality corresponds entirely to the contradictory
essence which they have accepted as their principle. The discordant reality
of industry, far from refusing their internally discordant principle, actually
confirms it. Their principle is in fact the principle of this discordance.

The physiocratic doctrine of Dr Quesnay forms the transition from
the mercantile system to Adam Smith. Physiocracy is, in a direct sense,
the economic dissolution of feudal property, but it is therefore just as
directly the economic transformation and restoration of that property.
The only real difference is that its language is no longer feudal but economic.
All wealth is resolved into land and agriculture. The land is not yet capital;
it is still a particular mode of existence of capital whose value is supposed
to lie in its natural particularity. But land is a universal natural element,
whereas the mercantile system considered that wealth existed only in precious
metals. The object of wealth, its matter, has therefore attained the greatest
degree of universality possible within the limits of nature – insofar
as it is directly objective wealth even as nature. And it is only through
labor, through agriculture, that land exists for man. Consequently, the
subjective essence of wealth is already transferred to labor. But, at the
same time, agriculture is the only productive labor. Labor is, therefore,
not yet grasped in its universal and abstract form, but is still tied to
a particular element of nature as its matter and if for that reason recognized
only in a particular mode of existence determined by nature. It is, therefore,
still only a determinate, particular externalization of man – just as
its product is conceived as a determinate form of wealth, due more to nature
than to itself. Here, the land is still regarded as part of nature which
is independent of man, and not yet as capital – i.e., as a moment
of labor itself. Rather, labor appears as a moment of nature. But, since
the fetishism of the old external wealth, which exists only as an object,
has been reduced to a very simple element of nature, and since its essence
has been recognized – even if only partially and in a particular way –
in its subjective essence, the necessary advance has taken place in the
sense that the universal nature of wealth has been recognized and labor
has, therefore, been elevated in its absolute – i.e., abstract
– form to that principle. It is possible to argue against the Physiocrats
that agriculture is no different from an economic point of view – that
is, from the only valid point of view – from any other industry, and that
the essence of wealth is therefore not a particular form of labor tied
to a particular element, a particular manifestation of labor, but labor
in general.

Physiocracy denies particular, external, purely objective wealth
by declaring labor to be its essence. But, for physiocracy, labor is in
the first place merely the subjective essence of landed property – it
starts out from the type of property which appears historically as the
dominant and recognized type. It simple turns landed property into alienated
man. It abolishes the feudal character of landed property by declaring
industry (agriculture) to be its essence; but it sets its face against
the world of industry and acknowledges the feudal system by declaring agriculture
to be the only industry.

Clearly, once the subjective essence is grasped of industry constituting
itself in opposition to landed property – i.e., as industry –
this essence includes within it that opposition. For, just as industry
absorbs annulled landed property, so the subjective essence of industry
at the same time absorbs the subjective essence of landed property.

Just as landed property is the first form of private property,
and industry at first confronts it historically as nothing more than a
particular sort of private property – or, rather, as the liberated slave
of landed property – so this process is repeated in the scientific comprehension
of the subjective essence of private property, of labor; labor appears
at first only as agricultural labor, but later assumes the form of labor
in general.

All wealth has become industrial wealth, wealth of labor, and
industry is fully developed labor, just as the factory system is the perfected
essence of industry – i.e., of labor – and industrial capital
the fully developed objective form of private property.

Thus, we see that it is only at this point that private property
can perfect its rule over men and become, in its most universal form, a
world-historical power.

Private Property and Communism

ad page XXXIX. [ This section, “Private Property and Communism,”
formed an appendix to page XXXIX of the incomplete Second Manuscript. ]

But the antithesis between propertylessness
and property is still an indifferent antithesis, not grasped in its active
connection, its inner relation, not yet grasped as contradiction, as long
as it is not understood as the antithesis between labor and capital. In
its initial form, this antithesis can manifest itself even without the
advanced development of private property – as, for example, in ancient
Rome, in Turkey, etc. In such cases, it does not yet appear as established
by private property itself. But labor, the subjective essence of private
property as exclusion of property, and capital, objective labor as exclusion
of labor, constitute private property in its developed relation of contradiction:
a vigorous relation, therefore, driving towards resolution.

ad ibidem.

The supersession [Aufhebung] of self-estrangement follows the
same course self-estrangement. Private property is first considered only
in its objective aspect, but still with labor as its essence. Its form
of existence is therefore capital, which is to be abolished “as such” (Proudhon).
Or the particular form of labor – levelled down, parcelled, and, therefore,
unfree – is taken as the source of the harmfulness of private property
and its humanly estranged existence. For example, Fourier, like the Physiocrats,
regarded agriculture as at least the best form of labor, while Saint-Simon,
on the other hand, declared industrial labor as such to be the essence
and consequently wants exclusive rule by the industrialists and the improvement
of the condition of the workers. Finally, communism [that is, crude or
utopian communism, like Proudhon et al above] is the positive expression
of the abolition of private property, and, at first, appears as universal
private property. In grasping this relation in its universality, communism
is

(1) in its initial form only a generalization and completion
of that relation (of private property). As such, it appears in a dual form:
on the one hand, the domination of material property bulks so large that
it threatens to destroy everything which is not capable of being possessed
by everyone as private property; it wants to abstract from talent, etc.,
by force. Physical, immediate possession is the only purpose of
life nd existence as far as this communism is concerned; the category of
worker is not abolished but extended to all men; the relation of private
property remains the relation of the community to the world of things;
ultimately, this movement to oppose universal private property to private
property is expressed in bestial form – marriage (which is admittedly
a form of exclusive private property) is counterposed to the community
of women, where women become communal and common property. One might
say that this idea of a community of women is the revealed secret of this
as yet wholly crude and unthinking communism. Just as women are to go from
marriage into general prostitution, so the whole world of wealth – i.e.,
the objective essence of man – is to make the transition from the relation
of exclusive marriage with the private owner to the relation of universal
prostitution with the community. This communism, inasmuch as it negates
the personality of man in every sphere, is simply the logical expression
of the private property which is this negation. Universal envy constituting
itself as a power is the hidden form in which greed reasserts itself
and satisfies itself, but in another way. The thoughts of every
piece of private property as such are at least turned against richer private
property in the form of envy and the desire to level everything down; hence
these feelings in fact constitute the essence of competition. The crude
communist is merely the culmination of this envy and desire to level down
on the basis of a preconceived minimum. It has a definite, limited
measure. How little this abolition of private property is a true appropriation
is shown by the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilization,
and the return to the unnatural simplicity of the poor, unrefined
man who has no needs and who has not yet even reached the stage of private
property, let along gone beyond it.

(For crude communism) the community is simply a community of labor
and equality of wages, which are paid out by the communal capital,
the community as universal capitalist. Both sides of the relation are raised
to an unimaginary universality – labor as the condition in which
everyone is placed and capital as the acknowledged universality and power
of the community.

In the relationship with woman, as the prey and handmaid
of communal lust, is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists
for himself – for the secret of this relationship has its unambiguous,
decisive, open and revealed expression in the relationship of man to woman
and in the manner in which the direct, natural species- relationship is
conceived. The immediate, natural, necessary relation of human being to
human being is the relationship of man to woman. In this natural species-relationship,
the relation of man to nature is immediately his relation to man, just
as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature, his own natural
condition. Therefore, this relationship reveals in a sensuous form, reduced
to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become
nature for man or nature has become the human essence for man. It is possible
to judge from this relationship the entire level of development of mankind.
It follows from the character of this relationship of this relationship
how far man as a species-being, as man, has become himself
and grasped himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation
of human being to human being. It therefore demonstrates the extent to
which man's natural behavior has become human or the extent to which his
human essence has become a natural essence for him, the extent to which
his human nature has become nature for him. This relationship also demonstrates
the extent to which man's needs have become human needs, hence the extent
to which the other, as a human being, has become a need for him,
the extent to which in his most individual existence he is at the same
time a communal being.

The first positive abolition of private property – crude communism
– is therefore only a manifestation of the vileness of private property
trying to establish itself as the positive community.

(2) Communism

(a) still of a political nature, democratic or despotic;

(b) with the abolition of the state, but still essentially
incomplete and influenced by private property – i.e., by the estrangement
of man.

In both forms, communism already knows itself as the reintegration,
or return, of man into himself, the supersession of man's self-estrangement;
but since it has not yet comprehended the positive essence of private property,
or understood the human nature of need, it is still held captive and contaminated
by private property. True, it has understood its concept, but not yet in
essence.

[Marx now endeavors to explore his own version of communism, as
distinct from Proudhon et al above.]

(3) Communism is the positive supersession of private property
as human self-estrangement, and hence the true appropriation of the human
essence through and for man; it is the complete restoration of man to himself
as a social – i.e., human – being, a restoration which
has become conscious and which takes place within the entire wealth of
previous periods of development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism,
equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it
is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature, and between
man and man, the true resolution of the conflict between existence and
being, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and
necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution of the riddle
of history and knows itself to be the solution.

The entire movement of history is therefore both the actual act
of creation of communism – the birth of its empirical existence – and,
for its thinking consciousness, the comprehended and known movement of
its becoming; whereas the other communism, which is not yet fully developed,
seeks in isolated historical forms opposed to private property a historical
proof for itself, a proof drawn from what already exists, by wrenching
isolated moments from their proper places in the process of development
(a hobbyhorse Cabet, Villegardelle, etc., particularly like to ride) and
advancing them as proofs of its historical pedigree. But all it succeeds
in showing is that be far the greater part of this development contradicts
its assertions and that if it did not once exist, then the very fact that
it existed in the past refutes its claim to essential being [Wesen].

It is easy to see how necessary it is for the whole revolutionary
movement to find both its empirical and its theoretical basis in the movement
of private property or, to be exact, of the economy.

This material, immediately sensuous private property is the material,
sensuous expression of estranged human life. Its movement –production
and consumption – is the sensuous revelation of the movement of all previous
production – i.e., the realization or reality of man. Religion,
the family, the state, law, morality, science, art, etc., are only particular
modes of production and therefore come under its general law. The positive
supersession of private property, as the appropriation of human life, is
therefore the positive supersession of all estrangement, and the return
of man from religion, the family, the state, etc., to his human – i.e.,
social – existence. Religious estrangement as such takes place only in
the sphere of consciousness, of man's inner life, but economic estrangement
is that of real life – its supersession therefore embraces both aspects.
Clearly the nature of the movement in different countries initially depends
on whether the actual and acknowledged life of the people has its being
more in consciousness or in the external world, in ideal or in real life.
Communism begins with atheism (Owen), but atheism is initially far from
being communism, and is for the most part an abstraction. The philanthropy
of atheism is therefore at first nothing more than an abstract philosophical
philanthropy, while that of communism is at once real and directly bent
towards action.

We have seen how, assuming the positive supersession of private
property, man produces man, himself and other men; how the object, which
is the direct activity of his individuality, is at the same time his existence
for other men, their existence and their existence for him. Similarly,
however, both the material of labor and man as subject are the starting-point
as well as the outcome of the movement (and the historical necessity
of private-property lies precisely in the fact that they must be this starting-point).
So the social character is the general character of the whole movement;
just as society itself produces man as man, so it is produced by him. Activity
and consumption, both in their content and in their mode of existence,
are social activity and social consumption. The human essence
of nature exists only for social man; for only here does nature exist for
him as a bond with other men, as his existence for others and their existence
for him, as the vital element of human reality; only here does it exist
as the basis of his own human existence. Only here has his natural
existence become his human existence and nature become man for him. Society
is therefore the perfected unity in essence of man with nature, the true
resurrection of nature, the realized naturalism of man and the realized
humanism of nature. [Marx note at the bottom of the page: Prostitution
is only a particular expression of the universal prostitution of the worker,
and since prostitution is a relationship which includes not only the prostituted
but also the prostitutor – whose infamy is even greater – the capitalist
is also included in this category.]

Social activity and social consumption by no means exist solely
in the form of a directly communal activity and a directly communal consumption,
even though communal activity and communal consumption – i.e.,
activity and consumption that express and confirm themselves directly in
real association with other men – occur wherever that direct expression
of sociality [Gesellschaftlichkeit] springs from the essential nature of
the content of the activity and is appropriate to the nature of the consumption.

But even if I am active in the field of science, etc. – an activity
which I am seldom able to perform in direct association with other men
– I am still socially active because I am active as a man. It is not only
the material of my activity – including even the language in which the
thinker is active – which I receive as a social product. My own existence
is social activity. Therefore what I create from myself I create for society,
conscious of myself as a social being.

My universal consciousness is only the theoretical form of that
whose living form is the real community, society, whereas at present universal
consciousness is an abstraction from real life and as such in hostile opposition
to it. Hence the activity of my universal consciousness – as activity
– is my theoretical existence as a social being.

It is, above all, necessary to avoid once more establishing “society"
as an abstraction over against the individual. The individual is
the social being. His vital expression – even when it does not appear
in the direct form of a communal expression, conceived in association with
other men – is therefore an expression and confirmation of social life.
Man's individual and species-life are not two distinct things, however
much – and this is necessarily so – the mode of existence of individual
life is a more particular or a more general mode of the species-life, or
species-life a more particular or more general individual life.

As species-consciousness man confirms his real social life and
merely repeats in thought his actual existence; conversely, species-being
confirms itself in species-consciousness and exists for itself in its universality,
as a thinking being.

Man, however much he may therefore be a particular individual
– and it is just this particularity which makes him an individual totality,
the ideal totality, the subjective existence of thought and experienced
society for itself; he also exists in reality as the contemplation and
true enjoyment of social existence and as a totality of vital human expression.

It is true that thought and being are distinct, but at the same
time they are in unity with one another.

Death appears as the harsh victory of the species over the particular
individual, and seemingly contradicts their unity; but the particular individual
is only a particular species-being, and, as such, mortal.

(4) Just as private property is only the sensuous expression
of the fact that man becomes objective for himself and at the same time
becomes an alien and inhuman object for himself, that his expression of
life [Lebensausserung] is his alienation of life [Lebensentausserung],
and that his realization is a loss of reality, an alien reality, so the
positive supersession of private property – i.e., the sensuous
appropriation of the human essence and human life, of objective man and
of human works by and for man – should not be understood only in the sense
of direct, one-sided consumption, of possession, of having. Man appropriates
his integral essence in an integral way, as a total man. All his human
elations to the world – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking,
contemplating, sensing, wanting, acting, loving – in short, all the organs
of his individuality, like the organs which are directly communal in form,
are in their objective approach or in their approach to the object the
appropriation of that object. This appropriation of human reality, their
approach to the object, is the confirmation of human reality. [Marx's note:
It is therefore just as varied as the determinations of the human essence
and activities.] It is human effectiveness and human suffering, for suffering,
humanly conceived, is an enjoyment of the self for man.

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object
is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when
we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc., in short, when
we use it. Although private property conceives all these immediate
realizations of possession only as means of life; and the life they serve
is the life of private property, labor, and capitalization.

Therefore all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced
by the simple estrangement of all these senses – the sense of having.
So that it might give birth to its inner wealth, human nature had to be
reduced to this absolute poverty. (On the category of having see Hess in
Einundzwanzig Bogen.)

The supersession of private property is therefore the complete
emancipation of all human senses and attributes; but it is this emancipation
precisely because these senses and attributes have become human, subjectively
as well as objectively. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object
has become a social, human object, made by man for man. The senses have
therefore become theoreticians in their immediate praxis. They relate to
the thing for its own sake, but the thing itself is an objective human
relation to itself and to man, and vice versa. [Marx's note: In practice
I can only relate myself to a thing in a human way if the thing is related
in a human way to man.] Need or employment have therefore lost their egoistic
nature, and nature has lost its mere utility in the sense that its use
has become human use.

Similarly, senses and enjoyment of other men have become my own
appropriation. Apart from these direct organs, social organs are therefore
created in the form of society; for example, activity in direct
association with others, etc., has become an organ of my life expressions
and a mode of appropriation of human life.

Obviously the human eye takes in things in a different way from
the crude non-human eye, the hum ear in a different way from the crude
ear, etc.

To sum up: it is only when man's object becomes a human object
or objective that man does not lose himself in that object. This is only
possible when it becomes a social object for him and when he himself becomes
a social being for himself, just as society becomes a being for him in
this object.

On the one hand, therefore, it is only when objective reality
universally becomes for man in society the reality of man's essential powers,
becomes human reality, and thus the reality of his own essential powers,
that all objects become for him the objectification of himself, objects
that confirm and realize his individuality, his objects – i.e.,
he himself becomes the object. The manner in which they become his depends
on the nature of the object and the nature of the essential power that
corresponds to it; for it is just the determinateness of this relation
that constitutes the particular, real mode of affirmation. An object is
different for the eye from what it is for the ear, and the eye's object
is different for from the ear's. The peculiarity of each essential power
is precisely its peculiar essence, and thus also the peculiar mode of its
objectification, of its objectively real, living being. Man is therefore
affirmed in the objective world not only in thought but with all the senses.

On the other hand, let us look at the question in its subjective
aspect: only music can awaken the musical sense in man and the most beautiful
music has no sense for the unmusical ear, because my object can only be
the confirmation of one of my essential powers – i.e., can only
be for me insofar as my essential power exists for me as a subjective attribute
(this is because the sense of an object for me extends only as far as my
sense extends, only has sense for a sense that corresponds to that object).
In the same way, and for the same reasons, the senses of social man are
different from those of non-social man. Only through the objectively unfolded
wealth of human nature can the wealth of subjective human sensitivity –
a musical ear, an eye for the beauty of form, in short, senses capable
of human gratification – be either cultivated or created. For not only
the five senses, but also the so-called spiritual senses, the practical
senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, the human sense, the humanity of
the senses – all these come into being only through the existence of their
objects, through humanized nature. The cultivation of the five senses is
the work of all previous history. Sense which is a prisoner of crude practical
need has only a restricted sense. For a man who is starving, the human
form of food does not exist, only its abstract form exists; it could just
as well be present in its crudest form, and it would be hard to say how
this way of eating differs from that of animals. The man who is burdened
with worries and needs has no sense for the finest of plays; the dealer
in minerals sees only the commercial value, and not the beauty and peculiar
nature of the minerals; he lacks a mineralogical sense; thus the objectification
of the human essence, in a theoretical as well as a practical respect,
is necessary both in order to make man's senses human and to create an
appropriate human sense for the whole of the wealth of humanity and of
nature.

Just as in its initial stages society is presented with all the
material for this cultural development through the movement of private
property, and of its wealth and poverty – both material and intellectual
wealth and poverty – so the society that is fully developed produces man
in all the richness of his being, the rich man who is profoundly and abundantly
endowed with all the senses, as its constant reality. It can be seen how
subjectiveness and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity
and passivity [Leiden], lose their antithetical character, and hence their
existence as such antithesis, only in the social condition; it can be seen
how the resolution of the theoretical antitheses themselves is possible
only in a practical way, only through the practical energy of man, and
how their resolution is for that reason by no means only a problem of knowledge,
but a real problem of life, a problem which philosophy was unable to solve
precisely because it treated it as a purely theoretical problem.

It can be seen how the history of industry and the objective existence
of industry as it has developed is the open book of the essential powers
of man, man's psychology present in tangible form; up to now this history
has not been grasped in its connection with the nature of man, but only
in an external utilitarian aspect, for man, moving in the realm of estrangement,
was only capable of conceiving the general existence of man – religion,
or history in its abstract and universal form of politics, art, literature,
etc. – as the reality of man's essential powers and as man's species-activity.
In everyday, material industry (which can just as easily be considered
as a part of that general development as that general development itself
can be considered as a particular part of industry, since all human activity
up to now has been labor – i.e., industry, self-estranged activity)
we find ourselves confronted with the objectified powers of the human essence,
in the form of sensuous, alien, useful objects, in the form of estrangement.
A psychology for which this book, the most tangible and accessible part
of history, is closed, can never become a real science with a genuine content.
What indeed should we think of a science which primly abstracts from this
large area of human labor, and fails to sense its own inadequacy, even
though such an extended wealth of human activity says nothing more to it
perhaps than what can be said in one word – “need,” “common need"?

The natural sciences have been prolifically active and have gathered
together an ever growing mass of material. But philosophy has remained
just as alien to them as they have remained alien to philosophy. Their
momentary union was only a fantastic illusion. The will was there, but
not the means. Even historiography only incidentally takes account of natural
science, which it sees as contributing to enlightenment, utility and a
few great discoveries. But natural science has intervened in and transformed
human life all the more practically through industry and has prepared the
conditions for human emancipation, however much its immediate effect was
to complete the process was to complete the process of dehumanization.
Industry is the real historical relationship of nature, and hence of natural
science, to man. If it is then conceived as the exoteric revelation of
man's essential powers, the human essence of nature or the natural essence
of man can also be understood. Hence natural science will lose its abstractly
material, or rather idealist, orientation and become the basis of a human
science, just as it has already become – though in an estranged form –
the basis of actual human life. The idea of one basis for life and another
for science is from the very outset a lie. Nature as it comes into being
in human history – in the act of creation of human society – is the true
nature of man; hence nature as it comes into being through industry, though
in an estranged form, is true anthropological nature.

Sense perception (see Feuerbach) must be the basis of all science.
Only when science starts out from sense perception in the dual form of
sensuous consciousness and sensuous need – i.e., only when science
starts out from nature – is it real science. The whole of history is a
preparation, a development, for “man” to become the object of sensuous
consciousness and for the needs of “man as man” to become [sensuous] needs.
History itself is a real part of natural history and of nature's becoming
man. Natural science will, in time, subsume the science of man, just as
the science of man will subsume natural science: there will be one
science.

Man is the immediate object of natural science; for immediate
sensuous nature for man is, immediately, human sense perception (an identical
expression) in the form of the other man who is present in his sensuous
immediacy for him. His own sense perception only exists as human sense
perception for himself through the other man. But nature is the immediate
object of the science of man. Man's first object – man – is nature, sense
perception; and the particular sensuous human powers, since they can find
objective realization only in natural objects, can find self-knowledge
only in the science of nature in general. The element of thought itself,
the element of the vital expression of thought – language – is sensuous
nature. The social reality of nature and human natural science or the natural
science of man are identical expressions.

It can be seen how the rich man and the wealth of human need take
the place of the wealth and poverty of political economy. The rich man
is simultaneously the man in need of totality of vital human expression;
he is the man in whom his own realization exists as inner necessity, as
need. Given socialism, not only man's wealth but also his poverty acquire
a human and hence a social significance. Poverty is the passive bond which
makes man experience his greatest wealth – the other man – as need. The
domination of the objective essences within me, the sensuous outburst of
my essential activity, is passion, which here becomes the activity of my
being.

(5) A being sees himself as independent only when he stands
on his own feet, and he only stands on his own feet when he owes this existence
to himself. A man who lives by the grace of another regards himself as
a dependent being. But I live completely by the grace of another if I owe
him not only the maintenance of my life, but also its creation, if he is
the source of my life. My life is necessarily grounded outside itself if
it is not my own creation. The creation is therefore an idea which is very
hard to exorcize from the popular consciousness. This consciousness is
incapable of comprehending the self-mediated being [Durchsichselbstsein]
of nature and of man, since such a being contradicts all the palpable evidence
of practical life.

The creation of the Earth receives a heavy blow from the science
of geogeny – i.e., the science which depicts the formation of the
Earth, its coming to be, as a process of self-generation. Generatio
aequivoca [spontaneous generation] is the only practical refutation
of the theory of creation.

Now, it is easy to say to a particular individual what Aristotle
said: You were begotten by your father and your mother, which means that
in you the mating of two human beings, a human species-act, produced another
human being. Clearly, then, man also owes his existence to man in a physical
sense. Therefore, you should not only keep sight of the one aspect, the
infinite progression which leads you on to the question: “Who begot my
father, his grandfather, etc.?” You should also keep in mind the circular
movement sensuously perceptible in that progression whereby man reproduces
himself in the act of begetting and thus always remains the subject. But
you will reply: I grant you this circular movement, but you must also grant
me the right to progress back to the question: Your question is itself
a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrived at that question.
Ask yourself whether your question does not arise from a standpoint to
which I cannot reply because it is a perverse one. Ask yourself whether
that progression exists as such for rational thought. If you ask about
the creation of nature and of man, then you are abstracting from nature
and from man. You assume them as non-existent and want me to prove to you
that they exist. My answer is: Give up your abstraction and you will them
give up your question. But if you want to hold on to your abstraction,
then do so consistently, and if you assume the non-existence of man and
nature, then assume also your own non-existence, for you are also nature
and man. Do not think and do not ask me questions, for as soon as you think
and ask questions, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man
has no meaning. Or are you such an egoist that you assume everything as
non-existence and still want to exist yourself?

You can reply: I do not want to assume the nothingness of nature,
etc. I am only asking how it arose, just as I might ask the anatomist about
the formation of bones, etc.

But since for socialist man the whole of what is called world
history is nothing more than the creation of man through human labor, and
the development of nature for man, he therefore has palpable and incontrovertible
proof of his self-mediated birth, of his process of emergence. Since the
essentiality [Wesenhaftigkeit] of man and nature, a man as the existence
of nature for man and nature as the existence of man for man, has become
practically and sensuously perceptible, the question of an alien being,
being above nature and man – a question which implies an admission of
the unreality of nature and of man – has become impossible in practice.
Atheism, which is a denial of this unreality, no longer has any meaning,
for atheism is a negation of God, through which negation it asserts the
existence of man. But socialism as such no longer needs such mediation.
Its starting point is the theoretically and practically sensuous consciousness
of man and of nature as essential beings. It is the positive self-consciousness
of man, no longer mediated through the abolition of religion, just as real
life is positive reality no longer mediated through the abolition of private
property, through communism. Communism is the act of positing as the negation
of the negation, and is therefore a real phase, necessary for the next
period of historical development, in the emancipation and recovery of mankind.
Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate
future, but communism is not as such the goal of human development – the
form of human society.

Need, Production and Division of Labor

We have seen what significance the wealth of human
needs has, on the presupposition of socialism, and consequently what significance
a new mode of production and a new object of production have. A fresh confirmation
of human powers and a fresh enrichment of human nature. Under the system
of private property their significance is reversed. Each person speculates
on creating a new need in the other, with the aim of forcing him to make
a new sacrifice, placing him in a new dependence and seducing him into
a new kind of enjoyment and hence into economic ruin. Each attempts
to establish over the other an alien power, in the hope of thereby achieving
satisfaction of his own selfish needs. With the mass of objects grows the
realm of alien powers to which man is subjected, and each new product is
a new potentiality of mutual fraud and mutual pillage. Man becomes ever
poorer as a man, and needs ever more money if he is to achieve mastery
over the hostile being. The power of his money falls in inverse proportion
to the volume of production, – i.e., his need grows as the power
of money increases. The need for money is for that reason the real need
created by the modern economic system, and the only need it creates. The
quantity of money becomes more and more its sole important property. Just
as it reduces everything to its own form of abstraction, so it reduces
itself in the course of its own movement to something quantitative. Lack
of moderation and intemperance become its true standard. Subjectively this
is manifested partly in the fact that the expansion of production and needs
becomes the inventive and ever calculating slave of inhuman, refined, unnatural
and imaginary appetites – for private property does not know how to transform
crude need into human need. Its idealism is fantasy, caprice, and infatuation.
No eunuch flatters his despot more basely, or uses more infamous means
to revive his flagging capacity for pleasure, in order to win a surreptitious
favor for himself, than does the eunuch of industry, the manufacturer,
in order to sneak himself a silver penny or two, or coax the gold from
the pocket of his dearly beloved neighbor. Every product is a bait with
which to entice the essence of the other, his money. Every real or potential
need is a weakness which will tempt the fly onto the lime-twig. Universal
exploitation of communal human nature. Just as each one of man's inadequacies
is a bond with heaven, a way into his heart for the priest, so every need
is an opportunity for stepping up to one's neighbor in sham friendship
and saying to him: “Dear friend, I can give you want you need, but you
know the terms. You know which ink you must use in signing yourself over
to me. I shall cheat you while I provide your pleasure.” He places himself
at the disposal of his neighbor's most depraved fancies, panders to his
needs, excites unhealthy appetites in him, and pounces on every weakness,
so that he can then demand the money for his labor of love.

This estrangement partly manifests itself in the fact that the
rent of needs and of the means of fulfilling them gives rise to a bestial
degeneration and a complete, crude and abstract simplicity of need; or
rather, that it merely reproduces itself in its opposite sense. Even the
need for fresh air ceases to be a need for the worker. Man reverts once
more to living in a cave, but the cave is now polluted by the mephitic
and pestilential breath of civilization. Moreover, the worker has no more
than a precarious right to live in it, for it is for him an alien power
that can be daily withdrawn and from which, should he fail to pay, he can
be evicted at any time. He actually has to pay for this mortuary. A dwelling
in the light, which Prometheus describes in Aeschylus as one of the great
gifts through which he transformed savages into men, ceases to exist for
the worker. Light, ire, etc. – the simplest animal cleanliness – cases
be a need for man. Dirt – this pollution and putrefaction of man, the
sewage (this word is to be understood in its literal sense) of civilization
– becomes an element of life for him. Universal unnatural neglect, putrefied
nature, becomes an element of life for him. None of this sense exist any
longer, either in their human form or in their inhuman form – i.e.,
not even in their animal form. The crudest modes (and instruments) of human
labor reappear; for example, the tread-mill used by Roman slave has become
the mode of production and mode of existence of many English workers. It
is not only human needs which man lacks – even his animal needs cease
to exist. The Irishman has only one need left – the need to eat, to eat
potatoes, and, more precisely, to eat rotten potatoes, the worst kind of
potatoes. But England and France already have a little Ireland in each
of their industrial cities.. The savage and the animal at least have the
need to hunt, to move about, etc., the need of companionship. The simplification
of machinery and of labor is used to make workers out of human beings who
are still growing, who are completely immature, out of children, while
the worker himself becomes a neglected child. The machine accommodates
itself to man's weakness, in order to turn weak man into a machine.

The fact that the multiplication of needs and of the means of
fulfilling them gives rise to a lack of needs and of means is proved by
the political economist (and by the capitalist – we invariably mean empirical
businessmen when we refer to political economists, who are the scientific
exposition and existence of the former) in the following ways:

(1) By reducing the worker's needs to the paltriest minimum
necessary to maintain his physical existence and by reducing his activity
to the most abstract mechanical movement. In so doing, the political economist
declares that man has no other needs, either in the sphere of activity
or in that of consumption. For even this life he calls human life and human
existence.

(2) By taking as his standard – his universal standard,
in the sense that it applies to the mass of men – the worst possible state
of privation which life (existence) can know. He turns the worker into
a being with neither needs nor senses and turn the worker's activity into
a pure abstraction from all activity. Hence any luxury that the worker
might enjoy is reprehensible, and anything that goes beyond the most abstract
need – either in the form of passive enjoyment or active expression –
appears to him as a luxury. Political economy, this science of wealth,
is therefore at the same time the science of denial, of starvation, of
saving, and it actually goes so far as to save man the need for fresh air
or physical exercise. This science of the marvels of industry is at the
same time the science of asceticism, and its true ideal is the ascetic
but rapacious skinflint and the ascetic but productive slave. Its moral
ideal is the worker who puts a part of his wages into savings, and it has
even discovered a servile art which can dignify this charming little notion
and present a sentimental version of it on the stage. It is therefore –
for all its worldly and debauched appearance – a truly moral science,
the most moral science of all. Self-denial, the denial of life and of all
human needs, is its principal doctrine. The less you eat, drink, buy books,
go to the theatre, go dancing, go drinking, think, love, theorize, sing,
paint, fence, etc., the more you save and the greater will become that
treasure which neither moths nor maggots can consume – your capital. The
less you are, the less you give expression to your life, the more you have,
the greater is your alienated life and the more you store up of your estranged
life. Everything which the political economist takes from you in terms
of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth,
and everything which you are unable to do, your money can do for you: it
can eat, drink, go dancing, go to the theatre, it can appropriate art,
learning, historical curiosities, political power, it can travel, it is
capable of doing all those thing for you; it can buy everything: it is genuine
wealth, genuine ability. But for all that, it only likes to create itself,
to buy itself, for after all everything else is its servant. And when I
have the master I have the servant, and I have no need of his servant.
So all passions and all activity are lost in greed. The worker is only
permitted to have enough for him to live, and he is only permitted to live
in order to have.

It is true that a controversy has arisen in the field of political
economy. One school (Lauderdale, Malthus, etc.) advocates luxury and execrates
thrift. The other (Say, Ricardo, etc.) advocates thrift and execrates luxury.
But the former admits that it wants luxury in order to produce labor –
i.e., absolute thrift; and the latter admits that it advocates thrift
in order to produce wealth – i.e., luxury. The former has the romantic
notion that greed alone should not regulate the consumption of the rich,
and it contradicts its own laws when it forwards the idea of prodigality
as a direct means of enrichment. The other side then advances earnest and
detailed arguments to show that through prodigality I diminish rather than
increase my possessions; but its supporters hypocritically refuse to admit
that production is regulated by caprice and luxury; they forget the “refined
needs” and forget that without consumption there can be no production;
they forget that, through competition, production becomes more extensive
and luxurious; they forget that it is use which determines the value of
a thing, and that it is fashion which determines use; they want only “useful
things” to be produced, but they forget that the production of too many
useful things produces too many useless people. Both sides forget that
prodigality and thrift, luxury and privation, wealth and poverty are equal.

And you must not only be parsimonious in gratifying your immediate
senses, such as eating, etc. You must also be chary of participating in
affairs of general interest, showing sympathy and trust, etc., if you want
to be economical and if you want to avoid being ruined by illusions.

You must make everything which is yours venal – i.e.,
useful. I might ask the political economist: am I obeying economic laws
if I make money by prostituting my body to the lust of another (in France,
the factory workers call the prostitution of their wives and daughters
the nth working hour, which is literally true), or if I sell my friend
to the Moroccans [where they still had Christian slaves] (and the direct
sale of men in the form of trade in conscripts, etc., occurs in all civilized
countries)? His answer will be: your acts do not contravene my laws, but
you find out what Cousin Morality and Cousin Religion have to say about
it; the morality and religion of my political economy have no objection
to make, but... But who should I believe, then? Political economy or morality?
The morality of political economy is gain, labor and thrift, sobriety –
and yet political economy promises to satisfy my needs. The political economy
of morality is the wealth of a good conscience, of virtue, etc. But how
can I be virtuous if I do not exist? And how can I have a good conscience
if I am not conscious of anything? It is inherent in the very nature of
estrangement that each sphere imposes upon me a different and contrary
standard; one standard for morality, one for political economy, and so
on. This is because each of them is a particular estrangement of man and
each is centred upon one particular area of estranged essential activity:
each is related in an estranged way to the other... Thus M. Michael Chevalier
accuses Ricardo of abstracting from morality. But Ricardo allows political
economy to speak its own language. If this language is not that of morality,
it is not the fault of Ricardo. M. Chevalier abstracts from political economy
insofar as he moralizes, but he really and necessarily abstracts from morality
insofar as he deals with political economy. The relationship of political
economy to morality is either an arbitrary and contingent one which is
neither founded nor scientific, a simulacrum, or it is essential and can
only be the relationship of economic laws to morality. If such a relationship
does not exist, or if the opposite is rather the case, can Ricardo do anything
about it? Moreover, the opposition between political economy and morality
is only an apparent one. It is both an opposition and not an opposition.
Political economy merely gives expression to moral laws in its own way.

Absence of needs as the principle of political economy is most
in its theory of population. There are too many people. Even the existence
of man is a pure luxury, and if the worker is “moral” he will be economical
in procreation. (Mill suggests public commendation of those who show themselves
temperate in sexual matters and public rebukes of those who sin against
this barrenness of marriage... Is this not the morality, the doctrine,
of asceticism?) The production of people appears as a public disaster.

The meaning which production has for the wealthy is revealed in
the meaning which it has for the poor. At the top, it always manifests
itself in refined, concealed, and ambiguous way – as an appearance. At
the bottom, it manifests itself in a crude, straightforward, and overt
way – as a reality. The crude need of the worker is a much greater source
of profit than the refined need of the rich. The basement dwellings in
London bring in more for the landlords than the palaces – i.e.,
they constitute a greater wealth for him and, from an economic point of
view, a greater social wealth.

Just as industry speculates on the refinement of needs, so too
it speculated on their crudity. But the crudity on which it speculates
is artificially produced, and its true manner of enjoyment is therefore
self-stupefaction, this apparent satisfaction of need, this civilization
within the crude barbarism of need. The English ginshops are, therefore,
the symbolic representation of private property. Their luxury demonstrated
to man the true relation of industrial luxury and wealth. For that reason,
they are rightly the only Sunday enjoyment of the English people, and are
at least treated mildly by the English police.

We have already seen how the political economist establishes the
unity of labor and capital in a number of different ways:

(1) capital is accumulated labor;

(2) the purpose of capital within production – partly
the reproduction of capital with profit, partly capital as raw material
(material of labor) and partly as itself a working instrument (the machine
is capital directly identified with labor) – is productive labor;

(3) the worker is a piece of capital;

(4) wages belong to the costs of capital;

(5) for the worker, labor is the reproduction of his life
capital;

(6) for the capitalist, it is a factor in the activity
of his capital. Finally,

(7) the political economist postulates the original unity
of capital and labor as the unity of capitalist and worker, which he sees
as the original state of bliss. The fact that these two elements leap at
each other's throats in the form of two persons is a contingent event for
the political economist, and hence only to be explained by external factors
(see Mill).

Those nations which are still dazzled by the sensuous glitter
of precious metals and, therefore, make a fetish of metal money are not
yet fully developed money nations. Compare England and France. The extent
to which the solution of theoretical problems is a function of practice
and is mediated through practice, and the extent to which true practice
is the condition of a real and positive theory is shown, for example, in
the case of fetish-worship. The sense perception of a fetish-worshipper
is different from that of a Greek because his sensuous existence is different.
The abstract hostility between sense and intellect is inevitable so long
as the human sense [Sinn] for nature, the human significance [Sinn] of
nature, and, hence, the natural sense of man, has not yet been produced
by man's own labor.

Equality is nothing but a translation into French – i.e.,
into political form – of the German “Ich - Ich". Equality as the basis
of communism is its political foundation. It is the same as when the German
founds it on the fact that he sees man as universal self-consciousness.
It goes without saying that the supersession of estrangement always emanates
from the form of estrangement which is the dominant power – in Germany,
self-consciousness; in France, equality, because politics; in England,
real, material, practical need, which only measures itself against itself.
It is from this point of view that Proudhon should be criticized and acknowledged.

If we characterize communism itself – which because of its character
as negation of the negation, as appropriation of the human essence which
is mediated with itself through the negation of private property, is not
yet the true, self-generating position [Position], but one generated
by private property... [Here, the corner of the page has been torn away,
and only fragments on the six sentences remain, rendering it impossible
to understand.]

... the real estrangement of human life remains and is all the
greater the more one is conscious of it as such, it can only be attained
once communism is established. In order to supersede the idea of private
property, the idea of communism is enough. In order to supersede private
property as it actually exists, real communist activity is necessary. History
will give rise to such activity, and the movement which we already know
in thought to be a self-superseding movement will in reality undergo a
very difficult and protracted process. But we must look upon it as a real
advance that we have gained, at the outset, an awareness of the limits
as well as the goal of this historical movement and are in a position to
see beyond it.

When communist workmen gather together, their immediate aim is
instruction, propaganda, etc. But at the same time, they acquire a new
need – the need for society – and what appears as a means had become
an end. This practical development can be most strikingly observed in the
gatherings of French socialist workers. Smoking, eating, and drinking,
etc., are no longer means of creating links between people. Company, association,
conversation, which in turn has society as its goal, is enough for them.
The brotherhood of man is not a hollow phrase, it is a reality, and the
nobility of man shines forth upon us from their work-worn figures.

When political economy maintains that supply and demand always
balance each other, it immediately forgets its own assertion that the supply
of people (the theory of population) always exceeds the demand and that
therefore the disproportion between supply and demand finds its most striking
expression in what is the essential goal of production – the existence
of man.

The extent to which money, which appears to be a means, is the
true power and the sole end – the extent to which in general the means
which gives me being and which appropriates for me alien and objective
being, is an end in itself... is apparent from the fact that landed property,
where the soil is the source of life, and the horse and the sword, where
they are the true means of life, are also recognized as the actual political
powers. In the Middle Ages, an Estate becomes emancipated as soon as it
is allowed to bear a sword. Among nomadic peoples, it is the horse which
makes one into a free man and a participant in the life of the community.

We said above that man is regressing to the cave dwelling, etc.
– but in an estranged, repugnant form. The savage in his cave – an element
of nature which is freely available for his use and shelter – does not
experience his environment as alien; he feels just as much at home as a
fish in water. But the poor man's basement dwelling is an uncongenial element,
an “alien, restrictive power which only surrenders itself to him at the
expense of his sweat and blood". He cannot look upon it as his home, as
somewhere he can call his own. Instead, he finds himself in someone else's
house, in an alien house, whose owner lies in wait for him every day, and
evicts him if he fails to pay the rent. At the same time, he is aware of
the difference in quality between his own dwelling and those other-worldly
human dwellings which exist in the heaven of wealth.

Estrangement appears not only in the fact that the means of my
life belong to another and that my desire is the inaccessible possession
of another, but also in the fact that all things are other than themselves,
that my activity is other than itself, and that finally – and this goes
for the capitalists too – an inhuman power rules over everything.

There is one form of inactive and extravagant wealth, given over
exclusively to pleasure, the owner of which is active as a merely ephemeral
individual, rushing about erratically. He looks upon the slave labor of
others, their human sweat and blood, as they prey of his desires, and regards
man in general – including himself – as a futile and sacrificial being.
He arrogantly looks down upon mankind, dissipating what would suffice to
keep alive a hundred human beings, and propagates the infamous illusion
that his unbridled extravagance and ceaseless, unproductive consumption
is a condition of the labor, and, hence, subsistence of the others. For
him, the realization of man's essential powers is simply the realization
of his own disorderly existence, his whims, and his capricious and bizarre
notions. But this wealth, which regards wealth as a mere means, worthy
only of destruction, and which is therefore both slave and master, both
generous and mean, capricious, conceited, presumptuous, refined, cultured,
and ingenious – this wealth has not yet experienced wealth as an entirely
alien power over itself; it sees in wealth nothing more than its own power,
the final aim of which is not wealth but consumption... [Here, the bottom
of the page is gone, losing perhaps three or four lines]

... and the glittering illusion about the nature of wealth –
an illusion which derives from its sensuous appearance – is confronted
by the working, sober, prosaic, economical industrialist who is enlightened
about the nature of wealth and who not only provides a wider range of opportunities
for the other's self-indulgence and flatters him through his products –
for his products are so many base compliments to the appetites of the spendthrift
– but also manages to appropriate for himself in the only useful way the
other's dwindling power. So if industrial wealth at first appears to be
the product of extravagant, fantastic wealth, in its inherent course of
development it actively supplants the latter. For the fall in the interest
on money is a necessary consequence and result of industrial development.
Therefore, the means of the extravagant rentier diminish daily in inverse
proportion to the growing possibilities and temptations of pleasure. He
must, therefore, either consume his capital himself, and in so doing bring
about his own ruin, or become an industrial capitalist.... On the other
hand, it is true that there is a direct and constant rise in the rent of
land as a result of industrial development, but as we have already seen
there inevitably comes a time when landed property, like every other kind
of property, falls into the category of capital which reproduces itself
with profit – and this is a result of the same industrial development.
Therefore, even the extravagant landlord is forced either to consume his
capital – i.e., ruin himself – or become the tenant farmer of
his own property – an agricultural industrialist.

The decline in the rate of interest – which Proudhon regards
as the abolition of capital and as a tendency towards the socialization
of capital – is therefore rather a direct symptom of the complete victory
of working capital over prodigal wealth – i.e., the transformation
of all private property into industrial capital. It is the complete victory
of private property over all those of its qualities which are still apparently
human and the total subjugation of the property owner to the essence of
private property – labor. To be sure, the industrial capitalist also seek
s enjoyment. He does not by any means regress to an unnatural simplicity
of need, but his enjoyment is only incidental, a means of relaxation; it
is subordinated to production, it is a calculated and even an economical
form of pleasure, for it is charged as an expense of capital; the sum dissipated
may therefore not be in excess of what can be replaced by the reproduction
of capital with profit. Enjoyment is, therefore, subsumed under capital,
and the pleasure-seeking individual under the capitalizing individual,
whereas earlier the contrary was the case. The decline in the rate of interest
is therefore a symptom of the abolition of capital only insofar as it is
a symptom of the growing domination of capital, of that growing estrangement
which is hastening towards its own abolition. This is the only way in which
that which exists affirms its opposite.

The wrangle among political economists about luxury and saving
is therefore merely a wrangle between that section of political economy
which has become aware of the nature of wealth and that section which is
still imprisoned within romantic and anti-industrial memories. But neither
of them knows how to express the object of the controversy in simple terms,
and neither of them is therefore in a position to clinch the argument.

Furthermore, the rent of land qua rent of land has been abolished,
for the argument of the Physiocrats, who say that the landowner is the
only true producer, has been demolished by the political economists, who
show that the landowner as such is the only completely unproductive rentier.
Agriculture is a matter for the capitalist, who invests his capital in
this way when he can expect to make a normal profit. The argument of the
Physiocrats that landed property, as the only productive property, should
alone pay state taxes and should therefore alone give its consent to them
and take part in state affairs, is turned into the opposite argument that
the tax on rent of land is the only tax on unproductive income and hence
the only tax which does not harm national production. Naturally, it follows
from this argument that the landowner can no longer derive political privileges
from his position as principal tax-payer.

Everything which Proudhon interprets as the growing power of labor
as against capital is simply the growing power of labor in the form of
capital, industrial capital, as against capital which is not consumed as
capital – i.e, industrially. And this development is on its way to victory
– i.e., the victory of industrial capital.

Clearly, then, it is only when labor is grasped as the essence
of private property that the development of the economy as such can be
analyzed in its real determinateness.

Society, as it appears to the political economist, is civil society,
in which each individual is a totality of needs and only exists for the
other as the other exists for him – insofar as each becomes a means for
the other. The political economist, like politics in its rights of man,
reduces everything to man – i.e., to the individual, whom he divests
of all his determinateness in order to classify him as a capitalist or
a worker.

The division of labor is the economic expression of the social
nature of labor within estrangement. Or, rather, since labor is only an
expression of human activity within alienation, an expression of life as
alienation of life, the division of labor is nothing more than the estranged,
alienated positing of human activity as a real species-activity or as activity
of man as a species-being.

Political economists are very unclear and self-contradictory about
the essence of the division of labor, which was naturally seen as one of
the main driving forces in the production of wealth as soon as labor was
seen to be the essence of private property. That is to say, they are very
unclear about human activity as species activity in this its estranged
and alienated form.

Adam Smith:

"The division of labor... is not originally the effect of any
human wisdom.... It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual
consequence of the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one
thing for another. Whether this propensity be one of those
original principles of human nature... or whether, as seems more
probably, it be the necessary consequence of the faculties of
reason and of speech it belongs not to our present subject to
inquire. It is common to all men, and to be found in no other race
of animals.... In almost every other race of animals the
individual when it is grown up to maturity is entirely
independent.... But man has almost constant occasion for the help
of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their
benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can
interest their self-love in his favor, and show them that it is for
their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them.... We
address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and
never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages."

“As it is by treaty, by barter, and by purchase that we obtain from
one another the greater part of those mutual good offices that we
stand in need of, so it is this same trucking disposition which
originally gives occasion to the division of labor. In a tribe of
hunters or shepherds a particular person makes bows and arrows, for
example, with more readiness and dexterity than any other. He
frequently exchanges them for cattle or for venison with his
companions; and he finds at last that he can in this manner get
more cattle and venison than if he himself went to the field to
catch them. From a regard to his own interest, therefore, the
making of bows and arrows grows to be his chief business..."

“The difference of natural talents in different men... is not...
so much the cause as the effect of the division of labor....
Without the disposition to truck, barter, and exchange, every man
must have procured to himself every necessary and conveniency of
life which he wanted. All must have had... the same work to do,
and there could have been no such difference of employment as could
alone give occasion to any great difference of talent."

“As it is this disposition which forms that difference of
talents... among men, so it is this same disposition which renders
that difference useful. Many tribes of animals... of the same
species derive from nature a much more remarkable distinction of
genius than what, antecedent to custom and education, appears to
take place among men. By nature a philosopher is not in genius and
in disposition half so different from a street-porter, as a mastiff
is from a greyhound, or a greyhound from a spaniel, or this last
from a shepherd's dog. Those different tribes of animals, however,
though all of the same species, are of scarce any use to one
another. The strength of the mastiff is not, in the least,
supported for example by the swiftness of the greyhound.... The
effects of those geniuses and talents, for want of the power or
disposition to barter and exchange, cannot be brought into a common
stock, and do not in the least contribute to the better
accommodation and conveniency of the species. Each animal is still
obliged to support and defend itself, separately and independently,
and derives no sort of advantage from that variety of talents with
which nature has distinguished its fellows. Among men, on the
contrary, the most dissimilar geniuses are of use to one another;
the different produces of their respective talents, by the general
disposition to truck, barter, and exchange, bring brought, as it
were, into a common stock, where every man may purchase whatever
part of the produce of other men's talents he has occasion for.”

“As it is the power of exchanging that gives occasion to the
division of labor, so the extent of this division must always be
limited by the extent of that power, or in other words, by the
extent of the market. When the market is very small, no person can
have any encouragement to dedicate himself entirely to one
employment, for want of the power to exchange all that surplus
part of the produce of his own labor, which is over and above his
own consumption, for such parts of the produce of other men's labor
as he has occasion for.”

[ Smith, I, p.12,13,14,15 ]

In an advanced state of society “every man thus lives by
exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society
itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society."

[ Smith, I, pp.20 ]

(See Destutt de Tracy: “Society is a series of reciprocal exchanges; commerce
contains the whole essence of society.") The accumulation of capitals increases
with the division of labor, and vice-versa.

Thus far Adam Smith.

"If every family produced all that it consumed, society could keep
going even if no exchange of any sort took place... Although it is
not fundamental, exchange is indispensable in our advanced state of
society... The division of labor is a skilful application of the
powers of man; it increases society's production – its power and
its pleasures – but it robs the individual, reduces the capacity
of each person taken individually. Production cannot take place
without exchange."

[Smith, I, pp.76-7]

Thus J.-B. Say.

"The powers inherent in man are his intelligence and his physical
capacity for work. Those which spring from the condition of
society consist of the capacity to divide labor and to distribute
different tasks among the different people... and the power to
exchange mutual services and the products which constitute these
means... The motive which induces a man to give his services to
another is self-interest – he demands a recompense for the
services rendered. The right of exclusive private property is
indispensable to the establishment of exchange among men."

Mill presents developed exchange, trade, as a consequence of the
division of labor.

“... the agency of man can be traced to very simple elements. He
can, in fact, do nothing more than produce motion. He can move
things towards one another; and he can separate them from one
another; the properties of matter perform all the rest....

“In the employment of labor and machinery, it is often found that
the effects can be increased by skilful distribution, by separating
all those operations which have any tendency to impede one another,
by bringing together all those operations which can be made in any
way to aid one another. As men in general cannot perform many
different operations with the same quickness and dexterity with
which they can, by practice, learn to perform a few, it is always
an advantage to limit as much as possible the number of operations
imposed upon each. For dividing labor, and distributing the power
of men and machinery, to the greatest advantage, it is in most
cases necessary to operate upon large scale; in other words, to
produce the commodities in great masses. It is this advantage
which gives existence to the great manufactories; a few of which,
placed in the most convenient situations, sometimes supply not one
country, but many countries, with as much as they desire of the
commodity produced."

[ James Mill, Elements of Political Economy, London, 1821, pp.5-9 ]

Thus Mill.

But all the modern political economists agree that division of
labor and volume of production, division of labor and accumulation of capital,
are mutually determining, and that only liberated private property, left
to itself, is capable of producing the most effective and comprehensive
division of labor.

Adam Smith's argument can be summed up as follows: the division
of labor gives labor an infinite capacity to produce. It has its basis
in the propensity to exchange and barter, a specifically human propensity
which is probably not fortuitous but determined by the use of reason and
of language. The motive of those engaged in exchange is not humanity but
egoism. The diversity of human talents is more the effect than the cause
of the division of labor – i.e., of exchange. Moreover, it is only
on account of the latter that this diversity is useful. The particular
qualities of the different races within a species of animal are by nature
more marked than the difference between human aptitudes and activities.
But since animals are not able to exchange, the diversity of qualities
in animals of the same species but of different races does not benefit
any individual animal. Animals are unable to combine the different qualities
of their species; they are incapable of contributing anything to the common
good and the common comfort of their species. This is not the case with
men, whose most disparate talents and modes of activity are of benefit
to each other, because they can gather together their different products
in a common reserve from which each can make his purchases. Just as the
division of labor stems from the propensity to exchange, so it grows and
is limited by the extent of exchange, of the market. In developed conditions
each man is a merchant and society is a trading association.

Say regards exchange as fortuitous and not basic. Society could
exist without it. It becomes indispensable in an advanced state of society.
Yet production cannot take place without it. The division of labor is a
convenient, useful means, a skilful application of human powers for social
wealth, but it is a diminution of the capacity of each man taken individually.
This last remark is an advance of Say's part.

Skarbek distinguishes the individual powers inherent in man –
intelligence and physical capacity for work – from those powers which
are derived from society – exchange and division of labor, which mutually
condition each other. But the necessary precondition of exchange is private
property. Skarbek is here giving expression in objective form to what Smith,
Say, Ricardo, etc., say when they designate egoism and private self-interest
as the basis of exchange and haggling as the essential and adequate form
of exchange.

Mill presents trade as a consequence of the division of labor.
For him, human activity is reduced to mechanical movement. The division
of labor and the use of machinery promote abundance of production. Each
person must be allocated the smallest possible sphere of operations. The
division of labor and the use of machinery, for their part, require the
production of wealth en masse, which means a concentration of production.
This is the reason for the big factories.

The consideration of the division of labor and exchange is of
the highest interest, because they are the perceptibly alienated expressions
of human activity and essential powers as species-activity and species-power.

To say that the division of labor and exchange are based on private
property is simply to say that labor is the essence of private property
– an assertion that the political economist is incapable of proving and
which we intend to prove for him. It is precisely in the fact that the
division of labor and exchange are configurations of private property that
we find the proof, both that human life needed private property for its
realization and that it now needs the abolition of private property.

The division of labor and exchange are the two phenomena on whose
account the political economist brags about the social nature of his science,
while in the same breath he unconsciously expresses the contradiction which
underlies his science – the establishment of society through unsocial,
particular interests.

The factors we have to consider are these: the propensity to exchange,
which is grounded in egoism, is regarded as the cause or the reciprocal
effect of the division of labor. Say regards exchange as not fundamental
to the nature of society. Wealth and production are explained by the division
of labor and exchange. The impoverishment and denaturing [Entwesung] of
individual activity by the division of labor are admitted. Exchange and
division of labor are acknowledged as producers of the great diversity
of human talents, a diversity which becomes useful because of exchange.
Skarbek divides man's powers of production or essential powers into two
parts:

(1) those which are individual and inherent in him, his
intelligence and his special disposition or capacity for work; and

(2) those which are derived not from the real individual
but from society, the division of labor and exchange.

Furthermore, the division of labor is limited by the market. Human
labor is simply mechanical movement; most of the work is done by the material
properties of the objects. Each individual must be allocated the smallest
number of operations possible. Fragmentation of labor and concentration
of capital; the nothingness of individual production and the production
of wealth en masse. Meaning of free private property in the division
of labor.

Money

If man's feelings, passions, etc., are not merely
anthropological characteristics in the narrower sense, but are truly ontological
affirmations of his essence (nature), and if they only really affirm themselves
insofar as their object exists sensuously for them, then it is clear:

(1) That their mode of affirmation is by no means one and
the same, but rather that the different modes of affirmation constitute
the particular character of their existence, of their life. The mode in
which the object exists for them is the characteristic mode of their gratification.

(2) Where the sensuous affirmation is a direct annulment
[Aufheben] of the object in its independent form (eating, drinking, fashioning
of objects, etc.), this is the affirmation of the object.

(3) Insofar as man, and hence also his feelings, etc.,
are human, the affirmation of the object by another is also his own gratification.

(4) Only through developed industry – i.e., through
mediation of private property, does the ontological essence of human passion
come into being, both in its totality and in its humanity; the science
of man is, therefore, itself a product of the self-formation of man through
practical activity.

(5) The meaning of private property, freed from its estrangement,
is the existence of essential objects for man, both as objects of enjoyment
and of activity.

Money, inasmuch as it possess the property of being able to buy
everything and appropriate all objects, is the object most worth possessing.
The universality of this property is the basis of money's omnipotence;
hence, it is regarded as an omnipotent being... Money is the pimp between
need and object, between life and man's means of life. But that which mediates
my life also mediates the existence of other men for me. It is for
me the other person.

What, man! confound it, hands and feet
And head and backside, all are yours!
And what we take while life is sweet,
Is that to be declared not ours?
Six stallions, say, I can afford,
Is not their strength my property?
I tear along, a sporting lord,
As if their legs belonged to me.

(Goethe, Faust – Mephistopheles)
[ Part I, scene 4 ]

Shakespeare, in Timon of Athens:

Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold! No, gods,
I am no idle votarist; roots, you clear heavens!
Thus much of this will make black, white; foul, fair;
Wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant.
... Why, this
Will lug your priests and servants from your sides;
Pluck stout men's pillows from below their heads:
This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions; bless th'accurst;
Make the hoar leprosy adored; place thieves,
And give them title, knee, and approbation,
With senators on the bench: this is it
That makes the wappen'd widow wed again;
She whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores
Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices
To th'April day again. Come, damned earth,
Thou common whore of mankind, that putt'st odds
Among the rout of nations, I will make thee
Do thy right nature.

And, later on:

O thou sweet king-killer, and dear divorce
'Twixt natural son and sire! Thou bright defiler
Of Hymen's purest bed! Thou valiant Mars!
Thou ever young, fresh, loved and delicate wooer,
Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow
That lies on Dian's lap! Thous visible god,
That solder'st close impossibilities,
And mak'st them kiss! That speak'st with every tongue,
To every purpose! O thou touch of hearts!
Think, thy slave man rebels; and by thy virtue
Set them into confounding odds, that beasts
May have in world empire!

Shakespeare paints a brilliant picture of the nature of money. To understand
him, let us begin by expounding the passage from Goethe.

That which exists for me through the medium of money, that which
I can pay for, i.e., that which money can buy, that am I, the possessor
of money. The stronger the power of my money, the stronger am I. The properties
of money are my, the possessor's, properties and essential powers. Therefore,
what I am and what I can do is by no means determined by my individuality.
I am ugly, but I can buy the most beautiful woman. Which means to say that
I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness, its repelling power, is destroyed
by money. As an individual, I am lame, but money procurs me 24 legs. Consequently,
I am not lame. I am a wicked, dishonest, unscrupulous and stupid individual,
but money is respected, and so also is its owner. Money is the highest
good, and consequently its owner is also good. Moreover, money spares me
the trouble of being dishonest, and I am therefore presumed to be honest.
I am mindless, but if money is the true mind of all things, how can its
owner be mindless? What is more, he can buy clever people for himself,
and is not he who has power over clever people cleverer than them? Through
money, I can have anything the human heart desires. Do I not possess all
human abilities? Does not money therefore transform all my incapacities
into their opposite?

If money is the bond which ties me to human life and society to
me, which links me to nature and to man, is money not the bond of all bonds?
Can it not bind and loose all bonds? Is it therefore not the universal
means of separation? It is the true agent of separation and the true cementing
agent, it is the chemical power of society.

Shakespeare brings out two properties of money in particular:

(1) It is the visible divinity, the transformation of all
human and natural qualities into their opposites, the universal confusion
and inversion of things; it brings together impossibilities.

(2) It is the universal whore, the universal pimp of men
and peoples.

The inversion and confusion of all human and natural qualities,
the bringing together of impossibilities, the divine power of money lies
in its nature as the estranged and alienating species-essence of man which
alienates itself by selling itself. It is the alienated capacity of mankind.

What I, as a man, do – i.e., what all my individual powers
cannot do – I can do with the help of money. Money, therefore, transforms
each of these essential powers into something which it is not, into its
opposite.

If I desire a meal, or want to take the mail coach because I am
not strong enough to make the journey on foot, money can provide me both
the meal and the mail coach – i.e., it transfers my wishes from
the realm of imagination, it translates them from their existence as thought,
imagination, and desires, into their sensuous, real existence, from imagination
into life, and from imagined being into real being. In this mediating role,
money is the truly creative power.

Demand also exists for those who have no money, but their demand
is simply a figment of the imagination. For me, or for any other third
party, it has no effect, no existence. For me, it therefore remains unreal
and without an object. The difference between effective demand based on
money and ineffective demand based on my need, my passion, my desire, etc.,
is the difference between being and thinking, between a representation
which merely exists within me and one which exists outside me as a real
object.

If I have money for travel, I have no need – i.e., no
real and self-realizing need – to travel. If I have a vocation to study,
but no money for it, I have no vocation to study – i.e.,
no real, true vocation. But, if I really do not have any vocation to study,
but have the will and the money, then I have an effective vocation
do to so. Money, which is the external, universal means and power – derived
not from man as man, and not from human society as society – to turn imagination
into reality and reality into more imagination, similarly turns real human
and natural powers into purely abstract representations, and therefore
imperfections and phantoms – truly impotent powers which exist only in
the individual's fantasy – into real essential powers and abilities. Thus
characterized, money is the universal inversion of individualities, which
it turns into their opposites and to whose qualities it attaches contradictory
qualities.

Money, therefore, appears as an inverting power in relation
to the individual and to those social and other bonds which claim to be
essences in themselves. It transforms loyalty into treason, love into hate,
hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master,
master into servant, nonsense into reason, and reason into nonsense.

Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds
and exchanges everything, it is the universal confusion and exchange
of all things, an inverted world, the confusion and exchange of all natural
and human qualities.

He who can buy courage is brave, even if he is a coward. Money
is not exchange for a particular quality, a particular thing, or for any
particular one of the essential powers of man, but for the whole objective
world of man and of nature. Seen from the standpoint of the person who
possesses it, money exchanges every quality for every other quality and
object, even if it is contradictory; it is the power which brings together
impossibilities and forces contradictions to embrace.

If we assume man to be man, and his relation to the world to be
a human one, then love can be exchanged only for love, trust for trust,
and so on. If you wish to enjoy art, you must be an artistically educated
person; if you wish to exercise influence on other men, you must be the
sort of person who has a truly stimulating and encouraging effect on others.
Each one of your relations to man – and to nature – must be a particular
expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual
life. If you love unrequitedly – i.e., if your love as love does
not call forth love in return, if, through the vital expression of yourself
as a loving person, you fail to become a loved person – then your love
is impotent, it is a misfortune.

Critique of Hegel's Dialectic and General Philosophy

This is, perhaps, the place to make a few remarks,
by way of explanation and justification, about the Hegelian dialectic –
both in general and in particular, as expounded in the Phenomenology
and Logic, as well as about its relation to the modern critical
movement.

Modern German criticism was so pre-occupied with the old world,
and so entangled during the course of its development with its subject-matter,
that it had a completely uncritical attitude to the method of criticism,
and was completely unaware of the seemingly formal but in fact essential
question of how we now stand in relation to the Hegelian dialectic. The
lack of awareness about the relation of modern criticism to Hegelian philosophy
in general and to the dialectic in particular has been so pronounced that
critics like Strauss and Bruno Bauer are still, at least implicitly, imprisoned
within Hegelian logic, the first completely so and the second in his Synoptiker
(where, in opposition to Strauss, he substitutes the “self-consciousness"
of abstract man for the substance of abstract nature) and even in his Das
entdeckte Christentum. For example, in Das entdeckte Christentum
we find the following passage:

“As if self-consciousness, in positing the world, that which is
different, and in producing itself in that which it produces, since
it then does away with the difference between what it has produced
and itself and since it is only in the producing and in the
movement that it is itself – as if it did not have its purpose in
this movement,” etc.

"They (the French Materialists) could not yet see that the movement
of the universe only really comes to exist for itself and enters
into unity with itself as the movement of self-consciousness."

[ Bauer, ibid., p.114 f. ]

These expressions are not even different in their language from the Hegelian
conception. They reproduce it word for word.

How little awareness there was of the relation to Hegel's dialectic
while this criticism was under way (Bauer's Synoptiker), and how
little even the completed criticism of the subject-matter contributed to
such an awareness, is clear from Bauer's Gute Sache der Freiheit,
where he dismisses Herr Gruppe's impertinent question “and now what will
happen to logic?” by referring him to future Critics.

But, now that Feuerbach, both in his “Thesen” in the Anekdota
and in greater detail in his Philosophie der Zukunft, has destroyed
the foundations of the old dialectic and philosophy, that very school of
Criticism, which was itself incapable of taking such a step but instead
watched while it was taken, has proclaimed itself the pure, resolute, absolute
Criticism which has achieved self-clarity, and in its spiritual pride has
reduced the whole process of history to the relation between the rest of
the world, which comes into the category of the “masses,” and itself. It
has assimilated all dogmatic antitheses into the one dogmatic antithesis
between its own sagacity and the stupidity of the world, between the critical
Christ and mankind – the “rabble". It has daily and hourly demonstrated
its own excellence against the mindlessness of the masses and has finally
announced that the critical Day of Judgment is drawing near, when the whole
of fallen humanity will be arrayed before it and divided into groups, whereupon
each group will receive its certificate of poverty. The school of Criticism
has made known in print its superiority to human feelings and the world,
above which it sits enthroned in sublime solitude, with nothing but an
occasional roar of sarcastic laughter from its Olympian lips. After all
these delightful capers of idealism (Young Hegelianism) which is expiring
in the form of Criticism, it (the critical school) has not once voiced
so much as a suspicion of the need for a critical debate with its progenitor,
the Hegelian dialectic. It has not even indicated a critical attitude to
Feuerbach's dialectic. A completely uncritical attitude towards itself.

Feuerbach is the only person who has a serious and critical attitude
to the Hegelian dialectic and who has made real discoveries in this field.
He is the true conqueror of the old philosophy. The magnitude of his achievement
and the quiet simplicity with which he present to to the world are in marked
contrast to the others.

Feuerbach's great achievement is:

(1) To have shown that philosophy is nothing more than
religion brought into thought and developed in thought, and that it is
equally to be condemned as another form and mode of existence of the estrangement
of man's nature.

(2) To have founded true materialism and real
science by making the social relation of “man to man” the basic principle
of this theory.

(3) To have opposed to the negation of the negation, which
claims to be the absolute positive, the positive which is based upon itself
and positively grounded in itself.

Feuerbach explains the Hegelian dialectic, and in so doing justifies
taking the positive, that is sensuously ascertained, as his starting-point,
in the following way:

Hegel starts out from the estrangement of substance (in logical
terms: from the infinite, the abstractly universal), from the absolute
and fixed abstraction. In ordinary language, he starts out from religion
and theology.

Secondly, he supercedes the infinite and posits the actual, the
sensuous, the real, the finite, the particular. (Philosophy as supersession
of religion and theology.)

Thirdly, he once more supersedes the positive, and restores the
abstraction, the infinite. Restoration of religion and theology.

Feuerbach, therefore, conceives the negation of the negation only
as a contradiction of philosophy with itself, as philosophy which affirms
theology (supersession, etc.) after having superseded it and, hence, affirms
it in opposition to itself.

The positing or self-affirmation and self-confirmation present
in the negation of the negation is regarded as a positing which is not
yet sure of itself, which is still preoccupied with its opposite, which
doubts itself and therefore stands in need of proof, which does not prove
itself through its own existence, which is not admitted. It is, therefore,
directly counterposed to that positing which is sensuously ascertained
and grounded in itself. (Feuerbach sees negation of the negation, the concrete
concept, as thought which surpasses itself in thought and as thought which
strives to be direct awareness, nature, reality.)

But, since he conceives the negation of the negation from the
aspect of the positive relation contained within it as the true and only
positive and from the aspect of the negative relation contained within
it as the only true act and self-realizing act of all being, Hegel has
merely discovered the abstract, logical, speculative expression of the
movement of history. This movement of history is not yet the real history
of man as a given subject, it is simply the process of his creation, the
history of his emergence. We shall explain both the abstract form of this
movement and the difference between Hegel's conception of this process
and that of modern criticism as formulated in Feuerbach's Das Wesen
des Christentums, or, rather, the critical form of a movement
which in Hegel is still uncritical.

Let us take a look at Hegel's system. We must begin with his Phenomenology,
which is the true birthplace and secret of the Hegelian philosophy.

[ chapter and section headings ]

Phenomenology

A. Self-consciousness

1. Consciousness.
(a) Certainty in sense experience, or the “this” and
meaning.
(b) Perception or the thing with its properties and
illusion.
(c) Power and understanding, phenomena and the
super-sensible world.

(a) Observational reason; observation of nature and of
self-consciousness.
(b) Realization of rational self-consciousness through
itself. Pleasure and necessity. The law of the
heart and the madness of self-conceit. Virtue and
the way of the world.
(c) Individuality which is real in and for itself. The
spiritual animal kingdom and deception or the thing
itself. Legislative reason. Reason which tests
laws.

Hegel's Encyclopaedia begins with logic, with pure speculative thought,
and ends with absolute knowledge, with the self-conscious, self-comprehending
philosophical or absolute mind – i.e., super-human, abstract mind.
In the same way, the whole of the Encyclopaedia is nothing but the
extended being or philosophical mind, its self-objectification; and the
philosophical mind is nothing but the estranged mind of the world thinking
within its self-estrangement – i.e., conceiving itself abstractly.
Logic is the currency of the mind, the speculative thought-value of man
and of nature, their essence which has become completely indifferent to
all real determinateness and hence unreal, alienated thought, and therefore
though which abstract from nature and from real man; abstract thought.
The external character of this abstract thought... nature as it is for
this abstract thought. Nature is external to it, its loss of self; it grasps
nature externally, as abstract thought, but as alienated abstract thought.
Finally mind, which is thought returning to its birthplace and which as
anthropological, phenomenological, psychological, moral, artistic-religious
mind, is not valid for itself until it finally discovers and affirms itself
as absolute knowledge and therefore as absolute, i.e., abstract
mind, receives its conscious and appropriate existence. For its real existence
is abstraction.

Hegel commits a double error.

The first appears most clearly in the Phenomenology, which
is the birthplace of Hegelian philosophy. When, for example, Hegel conceives
wealth, the power of the state, etc., as entities estranged from the being
of man, he conceives them only in their thought form... They are entities
of thought, and therefore simply an estrangement of pure – i.e.,
abstract – philosophical thought. Therefore, the entire movement ends
with absolute knowledge. What these objects are estranged from and what
they confront with their claim to reality is none other than abstract thought.
The philosopher – himself an abstract form of estranged man – sets himself
up as the yardstick of the estranged world. The entire history of alienation,
and the entire retraction of this alienation, is, therefore, nothing more
than the history history of the production of abstract (i.e., absolute),
though, of logical, speculative thought. Estrangement, which thus forms
the real interest of this alienation and its super-session, is the opposition
of in itself and for itself, of consciousness and self-consciousness, of
object and subject – i.e., the opposition within thought itself
of abstract thought and sensuous reality, or real sensuousness. All other
oppositions and the movements of these oppositions are only the appearance,
the mask, the exoteric form of these two opposites which are alone important
and which form the meaning of these other, profane oppositions. It is not
the fact that the human essence objectifies itself in an inhuman way, in
opposition to itself, but that it objectifies itself in distinction from
and in opposition to abstract thought, which constitutes the essence of
estrangement as it exists and as it is to be superseded.

The appropriation of man's objectified and estranged essential
powers is, therefore, firstly only an appropriation which takes place in
consciousness, in pure thought – i.e., in abstraction. In the Phenomenology,
therefore, despite its thoroughly negative and critical appearance, and
despite the fact that its criticism is genuine and often well ahead of
its time, the uncritical positivism, and equally uncritical idealism of
Hegel's later works, the philosophical dissolution and restoration of the
empirical world, is already to be found in its latent form, in embryo,
as a potentiality and a secret. Secondly, the vindication of the objective
world for man – e.g., the recognition that sensuous consciousness
is not abstractly sensuous consciousness, but humanly sensuous
consciousness; that religion, wealth, etc., are only the estranged reality
of human objectification, of human essential powers born into work, and
therefore only the way to true human reality – this appropriation, or
the insight into this process, therefore appears in Hegel in such a way
that sense perception, religion, the power of the state, etc., are spiritual
entities, for mind alone is the true essence of man, and the true form
of mind is the thinking mind, the logical, speculative mind. The humanity
of nature and of nature as produced by history, of man's products, is apparent
from the fact that they are products of abstract mind and therefore factors
of the mind, entities of thought. The Phenomenology is therefore
concealed and mystifying criticism, criticism which has not attained self-clarity;
but insofar as it grasps the estrangement of man – even though man appears
only in the form of mind – all the elements of criticism are concealed
within it, and often prepared and worked out in a way that goes far beyond
Hegel's own point of view. The “unhappy consciousness,” the “honest consciousness,”
the struggle of the “noble and base consciousness,” etc., etc., these separate
sections contain the critical elements – but still in estranged form –
of entire spheres, such as religion, the state, civil life and so fort.
Just as the entity, the object,appears as a thought-entity, so also the
subject is always consciousness of self-consciousness; or rather, the object
appears only as abstract consciousness and men only as self-consciousness.
The various forms of estrangement which occur are therefore merely different
forms of consciousness and self-consciousness. Since abstract consciousness,
which is how the object is conceived, is in itself only one moment in the
differentiation of self-consciousness, the result of the movement is the
identity of self-consciousness and consciousness, absolute knowledge, the
movement of abstract thought no longer directed outwards but proceeding
only within itself; i.e., the result is the dialectic of pure thought.

The importance of Hegel's Phenomenology and its final result
– the dialectic of negativity as the moving and producing principle –
lies in the fact that Hegel conceives the self-creation of man as a process,
objectification as loss of object [Entgegenstandlichung], as alienation
and as supersession of this alienation; that he therefore grasps the nature
of labor and conceives objective man – true, because real man – as the
result of his own labor. The real, active relation of man to himself as
a species-being, or the realization of himself as a real species-being
– i.e., as a human being, is only possible if he really employs
all this species-powers – which again is only possible through the cooperation
of mankind and as a result of history – and treats them as objects, which
is at first only possible in the form of estrangement.

*

We shall now demonstrate, in detail, the one-sidedness and the limitations
of Hegel, as observed in the closing chapter of the Phenomenology.
This chapter ("Absolute Knowledge") contains the concentrated essence of
the Phenomenology, its relation to the dialectic, and Hegel's consciousness
of both and their interrelations.

For the present, let us observe that Hegel adopts the standpoint
of modern political economy. He sees labor as the essence, the self-confirming
essence, of man; he sees only the positive and not the negative side of
labor. Labor is man's coming to be for himself within alienation or as
an alienated man. The only labor Hegel knows and recognizes is abstract
mental labor. So that which above all constitutes the essence of philosophy
– the alienation of man who knows himself or alienated science that thinks
itself – Hegel grasps as its essence, and is therefore able to bring together
the separate elements of previous philosophies and present his own philosophy
as the philosophy. What other philosophers did – that they conceived
separate moments of nature and of man's life as moments of self-consciousness,
indeed, of abstract self-consciousness – this Hegel knows by doing philosophy.
Therefore, his science is absolute.

Let us now proceed to our subject.

"Absolute Knowledge.” The last chapter of the Phenomenology.

The main point is that the object of consciousness is nothing
else but self-consciousness, or that the object is only objectified self-
consciousness, self-consciousness as object. (The positing of man = self-consciousness.)

It is, therefore, a question of surmounting the object of consciousness.
Objectivity as such is seen as an estranged human relationship which does
not correspond to human nature, to self-consciousness. The reappropriation
of the objective essence of man, produced in the form of estrangement as
something alien, therefore means transcending not only estrangement but
also objectivity. That is to say, man is regarded as a non-objective, spiritual
being.

Hegel describes the process of surmounting the object of consciousness
in the following way:

The object does not only show itself as returning into the self,
(according to Hegel that is a one-sided conception of the movement, a conception
which grasps only one side). Man is equated with self. But the self is
only abstractly conceived man, man produced by abstraction. Man is
self [selbstisch]. His eyes, his ears, etc., have the quality of
self; each one of his essential powers has this quality of self. But therefore
it is quite wrong to say that self-consciousness has eyes, ears, essential
powers. Self-consciousness is rather a quality of human nature, of the
human eye, etc.; human nature is not a quality of self-consciousness.

The self abstracted and fixed for itself is man as abstract egoist,
egoism raised to its pure abstraction in thought. (We shall come back to
this later.)

For Hegel, human nature, man, is equivalent to self-consciousness.
All estrangement of human nature is therefore nothing but estrangement
of self-consciousness not as the expression, reflected in knowledge and
in thought, of the real estrangement of human nature. On the contrary,
actual estrangement, estrangement which appears real, is in its innermost
hidden nature – which philosophy first brings to light – nothing more
than the appearance of the estrangement of real human nature, of self-consciousness.
The science which comprehends this is therefore called phenomenology. All
reappropriation of estranged objective being, therefore, appears as an
incorporation into self-consciousness; the man who takes hold of his being
is only the self-consciousness which takes hold of objective being. The
return of the object into the self is therefore the reappropriation of
the object.

Expressed comprehensively, the surmounting of the object of consciousness
means [the following eight points taken almost verbatim from Phenomenology,
chapter “Absolute Knowledge"]:

(1) That the object as such presents itself to consciousness
as something disappearing.

(2) That it is the alienation of self-consciousness which
establishes thingness [Dingheit].

(3) That this alienation has not only a negative but also
a positive significance. (4) That this significance is not only
for us or in itself, but for self-consciousness itself.

(5) For self-consciousness the negative of the object,
its own supersession of itself, has a positive significance – or self-consciousness
knows the nullity of the object – in that self-consciousness alienates
itself, for in this alienation it establishes itself as object of establishes
the object as itself, for the sake of the indivisible unity of being-for-itself.

(6) On the other hand, this other moment is also present
in the process, namely, that self-consciousness has superseded and taken
back into itself this alienation and objectivity, and is therefore at home
in its other-being as such.

(7) This is the movement of consciousness, and consciousness
is therefore the totality of its moments.

(8) Similarly, consciousness must have related itself to
the object in terms of the totality of its determinations, and have grasped
it in terms of each of them. This totality of determinations make the object
intrinsically [an sich] a spiritual being, and it becomes that in reality
for consciousness through the apprehending of each one of these determinations
as determinations of self or through what we earlier called the spiritual
attitude towards them.

As to (1)

That the object as such presents itself to consciousness as something
disappearing is the above-mentioned return of the object into self.

As to (2)

The alienation of self-consciousness establishes thingness. Because
man is equivalent to self-consciousness, his alienated objective being
or thingness (that which is an object for him, and the only true object
for him is that which is an essential object – i.e., his objective
essence; since it is not real man, and therefore not nature, for man is
human nature, who becomes as such the subject, but only the abstraction
of man, self-consciousness, thingness can only be alienated self-consciousness)
is the equivalent of alienated self-consciousness, and thingness is established
by this alienation. It is entirely to be expected that a living, natural
being equipped and endowed with objective – i.e., material – essential
powers should have real natural objects for the objects of its being, and
that its self-alienation should take the form of the establishment of a
real, objective world, but as something external to it, a world which does
not belong to its being and which overpowers it. There is nothing incomprehensible
or mysterious about that. It would only be mysterious if the contrary were
true. But it is equally clear that a self-consciousness, through its alienation,
can only establish thingness – i.e., and abstract thing, a thing
of abstraction and not a real thing. It is also clear that thingness is
therefore in no way something independent or substantial vis-a-vis self-consciousness;
it is a mere creature, a postulate of self-consciousness. And what is postulated,
instead of confirming itself, is only a confirmation of the act of postulating;
an act which, for a single moment, concentrates its energy as product and
apparently confers upon that product – but only for a moment – the role
of an independent, real being.

When real, corporeal man, his feet firmly planted on the solid
earth and breathing all the powers of nature, establishes his real, objective
essential powers as alien objects by externalization [Entausserung], it
is not the establishing [Setzen] which is subject; it is the subjectivity
of objective essential powers whose action must therefore be an objective
one. An objective being acts objectively, and it would not act objectively
is objectivity were not an inherent part of its essential nature. It creates
and establishes only objects because it is established by objects, because
it is fundamentally nature. In the act of establishing, it, therefore,
does not descend from its “pure activity” to the creation of objects; on
the contrary, its objective product simply confirms its objective activity,
its activity as the activity of an objective, natural being.

Here we see how the constant naturalism or humanism differs both
from idealism and materialism and is at the same time their unifying truth.
We also see that only naturalism is capable of comprehending the process
of world history.

Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being, and as a
living natural being, he is on the one hand equipped with natural powers,
with vital powers, he is an active natural being; these powers exist in
him as dispositions and capacities, as drives. On the other hand, as a
natural, corporeal, sensuous, objective being, he is a suffering, conditioned,
and limited being, like animals and plants. that is to say, the objects
of his drives exist outside him as objects independent of him; but these
objects are objects of his need, essential objects, indispensable to the
exercise and confirmation of his essential powers. To say that man is a
corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective being with natural powers
means that he has real, sensuous objects as the object of his being and
of his vital expression, or that he can only express his life in real,
sensuous objects. To be objective, natural, and sensuous, and to have object,
nature, and sense outside oneself, or to be oneself object, nature, and
sense for a third person is one and the same thing. Hunger is a natural
need; it therefore requires a nature and an object outside itself in order
to satisfy and still itself. Hunger is the acknowledged need of my body
for an object which exists outside itself and which is indispensable to
its integration and to the expression of its essential nature. The Sun
is an object for the plant, an indispensable object with confirms its life,
just as the plant is an object for the Sun, as expression of its life-awakening
power and its objective essential power.

A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a
natural being and plays no part in the system of nature. A being which
has no object outside itself is not an objective being. A being which is not itself
an object for some third being has no being for its object, i.e.,
it is not objectively related. Its being is not objective.

A non-objective being is a non-being.

Suppose a being which is neither an an object itself, nor has a object. Such a being,
in the first place, would be the unique being; there would exist no being
outside it – it would exist in a condition of solitude. For
as soon as there are objects outside me, as soon as I am not alone, I am
another, a reality other than the object outside me. For this third object
I am therefore a reality other than it – i.e., its object. A being
which is not the object of another being therefore presupposes that no
objective being exists. As soon as I have an object, this object has me
for its object. But a non-objective being is an unreal, non-sensuous, merely
thought – i.e., merely conceived – being, a being of abstraction.
To be sensuous – i.e., to be real – is to be an object of sense,
a sensuous object, and thus to have sensuous objects outside oneself, objects
of one's sense perception. To be sensuous is to suffer (to be subjected
to the actions of another).

Man as an objective sensuous being is therefore a suffering being,
and because he feels his suffering [Leiden], he is a passionate [leidenschaftliches]
being. Passion is man's essential power vigorously striving to attain its
object.

But man is not only a natural being; he is a human natural being;
i.e., he is a being for himself and hence a species-being, as which
he must confirm and realize himself both in his being and in his knowning.
Consequently, human objects are not natural objects as they immediately
present themselves, nor is human sense, in its immediate and objective
existence, human sensibility and human objectivity. Neither objective nor
subjective nature is immediately present in a form adequate to the human
being. And as everything natural must come into being, so man also has
his process of origin in history. But for him history is a conscious process,
and hence one which consciously superseded itself. History is the true
natural history of man. (We shall return to this later.)

Thirdly, since this establishing of thingness is itself only an
appearance, n act which contradicts the nature of pure activity, it must
be superseded once again and thingness must be denied.

As to 3, 4, 5, 6.

(3) This alienation of consciousness has not only a negative
but also a positive significance, and (4) it has this positive significance
not only for us or in itself, but for consciousness itself.

(5) For self-consciousness, the negative of the object
or its own supersession of itself has a positive significance – or self-consciousness
knows the nullity of the object – in that self-consciousness alienates
itself, for in this alienation it knows itself as object or, for the sake
of the individisible unity of being-for-itself, the object as itself.

(6) On the other hand, the other moment is also present
in the process, namely, that self-consciousness has superseded and taken
back into itself this alienation and objectivity, and is therefore at home
in its other-being as such.

To recapitulate. The appropriation of estranged objective being
or the supersession of objectivity in the form of estrangement – which
must proceed from indifferent otherness to real, hostile estrangement –
principally means for Hegel the supersession of objectivity, since it is
not the particular character of the object but its objective character
which constitutes the offense and the estrangement as far as self-consciousness
is concerned. The object is therefore negative, self-superseding, a nullity.
This nullity of the object has not only a negative but also a positive
significance for consciousness, for it is precisely the self-confirmation
of its non-objectivity and abstraction. For consciousness itself, the nullity
of the object therefore has a positive significance because it knows this
nullity, the objective being, as its self-alienation, because it knows
that this nullity exists only as a result of its own self-alienation...

The way in which consciousness is, and in which something is for
it, is knowing. Knowing is its only act. Hence, something comes to exist
for consciousness insofar as it knows that something. Knowing is its only
objective relationship. It knows the nullity of the object – i.e.,
that the object is not direct from it, the non-existence of the object
for it, in that it knows the object as its own self-alienation; that is,
it knows itself – i.e., it knows knowing, considered as an object
– in that the object is only the appearance of an object, an illusion,
which in essence is nothing more than knowing itself which has confronted
itself with itself and hence a nullity, a something which has no objectivity
outside knowing. Knowing knows that when it relates itself to an object
it is only outside itself, alienates itself; that it only appears to itself
as an object, or rather, that what appears to it as an object is only itself.

On the other hand, says, Hegel, this other moment is also present
in the process, namely, that self-consciousness has superseded and taken
back into itself this alienation and objectivity, and is therefore at home
in its other-being as such.

This discussion is a compendium of all the illusions of speculation.

Firstly, consciousness – self-consciousness – is at home in
its other-being as such. It is therefore, if we here abstract from Hegel's
abstraction and talk instead of self-consciousness, of the self-consciousness
of man, at home in its other-being as such. This implies, for one thing,
that consciousness – knowing as knowing, thinking as thinking – claims
to be the direct opposite of itself, claims to be the sensuous world, reality,
life – thought over-reaching itself in thought (Feuerbach). This aspect
is present insofar as consciousness as mere consciousness is offended not
by estranged objectivity but by objectivity as such.

Secondly, it implies that self-conscious man, insofar as he has
acknowledged and superseded the spiritual world, or the general spiritual
existence of his world, as self-alienation, goes on to reaffirm it in this
alienated form and presents it as his true existence, restores it and claims
to be at home in his other-being as such. Thus, for example, having superseded
religion and recognized it as a product of self-alienation, he still finds
himself confirmed in religion as religion. Here is the root of Hegel's
false positivism or of his merely apparent criticism; it is what Feuerbach
calls the positing, negating, and re-establishing of religion or theology,
but it needs to be conceived in a more general way. So reason is at home
in unreason as unreason. Man, who has realized that in law, politics, etc.,
he leads an alienated life as such. Self-affirmation, self-confirmation
in contradiction with itself and with the knowledge and the nature of the
object is therefore true knowledge and true life.

Therefore there can no longer be any question abut a compromise
on Hegel's part with religion, the state, etc., since this untruth is the
untruth of his principle.

If I know religion as alienated human self-consciousness, then
what I know in it as religion is not my self-consciousness but my alienated
self-consciousness confirmed in it. Thus I know that the self-consciousness
which belongs to the essence of my own self is confirmed not in religion
but in the destruction and supersession of religion.

In Hegel, therefore, the negation of the negation is not the confirmation
of true being through the negation of apparent being. It is the confirmation
of apparent being or self-estranged being in its negation, or the negation
of this apparent being as an objective being residing outside man and independent
of him and its transformation into the subject.

The act of superseding therefore plays a special role in which
negation and preservation (affirmation) are brought together.

Thus, for example, in Hegel's Philosophy of Right, private
right superseded equals morality, morality superseded equals family, family
superseded equals civil society, civil society superseded equals state,
and state superseded equals world history. In reality, private right, morality,
family, civil society, state, etc., continue to exist, but have become
moments and modes of human existence which are meaningless in isolation
but which mutually dissolve and engender one another. They are moments
of movement.

In their real existence this character of mobility is hidden.
It first appears, is first revealed, in thought and in philosophy. Hence,
my true religious existence is my existence in the philosophy of religion,
my true political existence is my existence in the philosophy of right,
my true natural existence is my existence in the philosophy of nature,
my true artistic existence is my existence in the philosophy of art and
my true human existence is my existence in philosophy. Similarly, the true
existence of religion, state, nature, and art is the philosophy of religion,
nature, the state and art. But if the philosophy of religions, etc., is
for me the true existence of religion, then I am truly religious only as
a philosopher of religion, and I therefore deny real religiosity and the
really religious man. But at the same time I confirm them, partly in my
own existence or in the alien existence which I oppose to them – for this
is merely their philosophical expression – and partly in their particular
and original form, for I regard them as merely apparent other-being, as
allegories, forms of their own true existence concealed under sensuous
mantles – i.e. forms of my philosophical existence.

On the one hand, this act of superseding is the act of superseding
an entity of thought; thus, private property as thought is superseded in
the thought of morality. And because thought imagines itself to be the
direct opposite of itself – i.e., sensuous reality – and therefore
regards its own activity as sensuous, real activity, this supersession
in thought, which leaves its object in existence in reality, thinks it
has actually overcome it. On the other hand, since the object has now become
a moment of thought for the thought which is doing the superseding, it
is regarded in its real existence as a continuation of thought, so self-consciousness,
of abstraction.

From one aspect the existence which Hegel superseded in philosophy
is therefore not real religion, state, nature, but religion already in
the form of an object of knowledge – i.e., dogmatics; hence also
jurisprudence, political science, and natural science. From this aspect,
he therefore stands in opposition both to the actual being and to the immediate
non-philosophical science or non-philosophical concepts of being. He therefore
contradicts their current conceptions.

From the other aspect the man who is religious, etc., can find
his final confirmation in Hegel.

We should now examine the positive moments of the Hegelian dialectic,
within the determining limits of estrangement.

(a) The act of superseding as an objective movement which
re-absorbs alienation into itself. This is the insight, expressed within
estrangement, into the appropriation of objective being through the supersession
of its alienation; it is the estranged insight into the real objectification
of man, into the real appropriation of his objective being through the
destruction of the estranged character of the objective world, through
the supersession of its estranged mode of existence, just as atheism as
the supersession of God is the emergence of theoretical humanism, and communism
as the supersession of private property the vindication of real human life
as man's property, the emergence of practical humanism. Atheism is humanism
mediated with itself through the supersession of religion; communism is
humanism mediated with itself through the supersession of private property.
Only when we have superseded this mediation – which is, however, a necessary
precondition – will positive humanism, positively originating in itself,
come into being.

But atheism and communism are no flight, no abstraction, no loss
of the objective world created by man or of his essential powers projected
into objectivity. No impoverished regression to unnatural, primitive simplicity.
They are rather the first real emergence, the realization become real for
man, of his essence as something real.

Therefore, in grasping the positive significance of the negation
which has reference to itself, even if once again in estranged form, Hegel
grasps man's self-estrangement alienation of being, loss of objectivity,
and loss of reality as self-discovery, expression of being, objectification
and realization. In short, he sees labor – within abstraction – as man's
act of self-creation and man's relation to himself as an alien being and
the manifestation of himself as an alien being as the emergence of species-consciousness
and species-life.

(b) But in Hegel, apart from or rather as a consequence
of the inversion we have already described, this act appears,firstly, to
be merely formal because it is abstract and because human nature itself
is seen only as abstract thinking being, as self-consciousness.

And secondly, because the conception is formal and abstract, the
supersession of alienation becomes a confirmation of alienation. In other
words, Hegel sees this movement of self-creation and self-objectification
in the form of self-alienation and self-estrangement as the absolute and
hence the final expression of human life which has itself as its aim, is
at rest in itself and has attained its own essential nature.

This movement in its abstract form as dialectic is therefore regarded
as truly human life. And since it is still an abstraction, an estrangement
of human life, it is regarded as a divine process, but as the divine process
of man. It is man's abstract, pure, absolute being (as distinct from himself),
which itself passes through this process.

Thirdly, this process must have a bearer, a subject; but the subject
comes into being only as the result; this result, the subject knowing itself
as absolute self-consciousness, is therefore God, absolute spirit, the
self-knowing and self-manifesting idea. Real man and real nature become
mere predicates, symbols of this hidden, unreal man and this unreal nature.
Subject and predicate therefore stand in a relation of absolute inversion
to one another; a mystical subject-object or subjectivity encroaching upon
the object, the absolute subject as a process, as a subject which alienates
itself and returns to itself from alienation, while at the same time re-absorbing
this alienation, and the subject as this process; pure, ceaseless revolving
within itself.

First, the formal and abstract conception of man's act of self-creation
of self-objectification.

Because Hegel equates man with self-consciousness, the estranged
object, the estranged essential reality of man is nothing but consciousness,
nothing but the thought of estrangement, its abstract and hence hollow
and unreal expression, negation. The supersession of alienation is therefore
likewise nothing but an abstract, hollow supersession of that hollow abstraction,
the negation of the negation. The inexhaustible, vital, sensuous, concrete
activity of self-objectification is therefore reduced to its mere abstraction,
absolute negativity, an abstraction which is then given permanent form
as such and conceived as independent activity, as activity itself. Since
this so-called negativity is nothing more than the abstract, empty form
of that real living act, its content can only be a formal content, created
by abstraction from all content. Consequently there are general, abstract
forms of abstraction which fit every content and are therefore indifferent
to all content: forms of thought and logical categories torn away from
real mind and real nature. (We shall expound the logical content of absolute
negativity later.)

Hegel's positive achievement in his speculative logic is to present
determinate concepts, the universal fixed thought-forms in their independence
of nature and mind, as a necessary result of the universal estrangement
of human existence, and thus also of human thought, and to comprehend them
as moments in the process of abstraction. For example, being superseded
is essence, essence superseded is the concept, the concept superseded is...
the absolute idea. But what is the absolute idea? It is compelled to supersede
its own self again, if it does not wish to go through the whole act of
abstraction once more from the beginning and to reconcile itself to being
a totality of abstraction which comprehends itself as abstraction knows
itself to be nothing; it must relinquish itself, the abstraction, and so
arrives at something which is its exact opposite, nature. Hence the whole
of the Logic is proof of the fact that abstract thought is nothing
for itself, that the absolute idea is nothing for itself, and that only
nature is something.

The absolute idea, the abstract idea which “considered from the
aspect of its unity with itself in intuition [Anschauen],” and which “in
its own absolute truth resolves to let the moment of it s particularity
or of initial determination and other-being, the immediate-idea, as its
reflection, issue freely from itself as nature,” this whole idea, which
conducts itself in such a strange and baroque fashion, and which has caused
the Hegelians such terrible headaches, is purely and simply abstraction
– i.e., the abstract thinker; abstraction which, taught by experience
and enlightened as to its own truth, resolves under various conditions
– themselves false and still abstract – to relinquish itself and to establish
its other-being, the particular, the determinate, in place of its self-pervasion
[Beisichsein], non-being, universality, and indeterminateness; to let nature,
which is concealed within itself as a mere abstraction, as a thing of things,
issue freely from itself – i.e., to abandon abstractions and to
take a look at nature, which exists free from abstraction. The abstract
idea, which directly becomes intuition, is quite simply nothing more than
abstract thought which relinquishes itself and decides to engage in intuiting.
This entire transition from logic to philosophy of nature is nothing more
than the transition – so difficult for the abstract thinker to effect,
and hence described by him in sich a bizarre manner – from abstracting
to intuiting. The mystical feeling which drives the philosopher from abstract
thinking to intuition is boredom, the longing for a content.

The man estranged from himself is also the thinker estranged from
his essence – i.e., from his natural and human essence. His thoughts
are therefore fixed phantoms existing outside nature and man. In his Logic,
Hegel has locked up all these phantoms, conceiving each of them firstly
as negative – i.e., as alienation of human thought – and secondly
as negation of the negation – i.e., as supersession of this alienation,
as a real expression of human thought. But since this negation of the negation
is itself still trapped in estrangement, what this amounts to is in part
a failure to move beyond the final stage, the stage of self-reference in
alienation, which is the true existence of these phantoms.

[Marx note: That is, Hegel substitutes the act of abstraction
revolving within itself for these fixed abstractions; in so doing he has
the merit, first of all, of having revealed the source of all these inappropriate
concepts which originally belonged to separate philosophers, of having
combined them and of having created as the object of criticism the exhaustive
range of abstraction rather than one particular abstraction. We shall later
see why Hegel separates thought from the subject; but it is already clear
that if man is not human, then the expression of his essential nature cannot
be human, and therefore that thought itself could not be conceived as an
expression of man's being, of man as a human and natural subject, with
eyes, ears, etc., living in society, in the world, and in nature.]

Insofar as this abstraction apprehends itself and experiences
an infinite boredom with itself, we find in Hegel an abandonment of abstract
thought which moves solely within thought, which has no eyes, teeth, ears,
anything, and a resolve to recognize nature as being and to go over to
intuition.

But nature, too, taken abstractly, for itself, and fixed in its
separation from man, is nothing for man. It goes without saying that the
abstract thinker who decides on intuition, intuits nature abstractly. Just
as nature lay enclosed in the thinker in a shape which even to him was
shrouded and mysterious, as an absolute idea, a thing of thought, so what
he allowed to come forth from himself was simply this abstract nature,
nature as a thing of thought – but with the significance now of being
the other-being of thought, real, intuited nature as distinct from abstract
thought. Or, to put it in human terms, the abstract thinker discovers from
intuiting nature that the entities which he imagined he was creating out
of nothing, out of pure abstraction, in a divine dialectic, as the pure
products of the labor of thought living and moving within itself and never
looking out into reality, are nothing more than abstractions from natural
forms. The whole of nature only repeats to him in a sensuous, external
form the abstractions of logic. He analyzes nature and these abstractions
again. His intuiting of nature is therefore only the act of confirmation
of his abstraction from the intuition of nature, a conscious re-enactment
of the process by which he produced his abstraction. Thus, for example,
Time is equated with Negativity referred to itself. In the natural form,
superseded Movement as Matter corresponds to superseded Becoming as Being.
Light is the natural form of Reflection-in-itself. Body as Moon and Comet
is the natural form of the antithesis which, according to the Logic,
is the positive grounded upon itself and the negative grounded upon itself.
The Earth is the natural form of the logical ground, as the negative unity
of the antithesis, etc.

Nature as nature – i.e., insofar as it is sensuously distinct
from the secret sense hidden within it – nature separated and distinct
from these abstractions is nothing, a nothing proving itself to be nothing,
it is devoid of sense, or only has the sense of an externality to be superseded.

“In the finite-teleological view is to be found the correct premise
that nature does not contain the absolute end within itself."

Its end is the confirmation of abstraction.

"Nature has revealed itself as the idea in the form of other-being.
Since the idea in this form is the negative of itself, or external
to itself, nature is not only external relative to this idea, but
externality constitutes the form in which it exists as nature.” [ Hegel p.225 ]

Externality here is not to be understood as the world of sense
which manifests itself and is accessible to the light,
to the man endowed with senses. It is to be taken here in
the sense of alienation, of a mistake, a defect, which ought not to be.
For what is true is still the idea. Nature is only
the form of the idea's other-being. And since abstract
thought is the essence, that which is external to it is by its
essence something merely external. The abstract thinker
recognises at the same time that sensuousness – externality
in contrast to thought shuttling back and forth within itself –
is the essence of nature. But he expresses this contrast in
such a way as to make this externality of nature, its contrast
to thought, its defect, so that inasmuch as it is distinguished
from abstraction, nature is something defective.
An entity which is defective not merely for me or in my
eyes but in itself – intrinscially – has something outside itself
which it lacks. That is, its essence is different from it itself.
Nature has therefore to supersede itself for the abstract thinker,
for it is already posited by him as a potentially superseded being.

“For us, mind has nature as its premise,
since it is nature's truth
and, therefore, its absolute primus. In this truth, nature has
disappeared, and mind has yielded as the idea which has attained
being-for-itself, whose object as well as subject is the concept.
This identity is absolute negativity, for, whereas in nature the
concept has its perfect external objectivity, in this its
alienation has been superseded and the concept has become
identical with itself. It is this identity only in that it is a
return from nature."

“Revelation, as the abstract idea, is unmediated transition to, the
coming-to-be, nature; as the revelation of the mind which is free it
is the establishing of nature as its own world; an establishing
which, as reflection, is at the same time a presupposing of the
world as independently existing nature. Revelation in its concept
is the creation of nature as the mind's being, in which it procures
the affirmation and truth of its freedom."

“The absolute is mind; this is the highest definition of the
absolute."